Timothée Chalamet as Bob Dylan in A Complete Unknown. Photo: Supplied
In A Complete Unknown, director James Mangold, with the help of co-screenwriter Jay Cocks and lead actor Timothée Chalamet, attempts to get us a little closer to unravelling the eternal mystery of Bob Dylan, but even he knows that it's an impossible task. After all, he is the one that called the film A Complete Unknown in the first place.
It's a story of someone who has been famously unknowable - and not much interested in being known - since he arrived in New York City as a budding folk singer in 1961, and not much has changed in the years since.
This is a character whose most recent new hit song was called 'I Contain Multitudes' and he still means it. Todd Haynes' 2007 film I'm Not There wrestled with this problem by having seven different actors play Dylan, like different facets of a single diamond, but it's a diamond that no one can ever own.
In this heavily condensed version of Dylan's early years in Greenwich Village and his breakthrough in the folk scene, he arrives on a mission to see the stricken singer Woody Guthrie (played by Scoot McNairy). Guthrie is in hospital, slowly dying of Huntington's Disease, but he's Dylan's great hero and he wants to play him a song.
On that hospital visit, the famous folk impresario Pete Seeger (Edward Norton) is there, and he takes the young Dylan under his wing, arranging gigs and making introductions. Dylan soon doesn't need any help as the songs - and his indefatigable ambition - get him a recording contract and a partnership with the already famous singer Joan Baez (played by the film's secret weapon, Monica Barbaro).
This Dylan is already rejecting the expectations that are being imposed on him, the short-sightedness and oppressive limitations of the folk scene. The tribal conservatism of the folk establishment is very well presented - archivist Alan Lomax, played by Norbert Leo Butz, doesn't come out particularly well but every film needs an antagonist, I guess.
But the audiences are also in the film's sights. Fans who never wanted anything about Dylan to change and who hated the idea of him plugging in his guitar to play something that sounded like rock and roll, the kind of music made famous by Little Richard. Folk in those days was a very white scene, a very safe scene, and Dylan wasn't much interested in that.
Dylan's first electric performance at the 1965 Newport Folk festival was 'Maggie's Farm' - a statement of intent, rejecting the path that he'd found himself on and making clear that he wasn't working for anybody but his own muse.
I think it's kind of wonderful that someone so determined to cloud the story of his origins would become famous playing a club called the Gaslight but that's just one aspect of Dylan's life that continues to delight me.
He's been an actor for Sam Peckinpah, a born-again Christian, a remarkable radio show host, a fan of Coronation Street, a Traveling Wilbury, made a quite extraordinary Christmas album, and - unlike Prince - actually turned up for 'We Are the World' despite being the least comfortable person in the room.
And, despite having nothing left to prove, he is still out there touring. No actor is going to be able to portray all that variety but Chalamet - paradoxically by not really trying - gets closer than you might think.
He's putting on some emotional, as well as physical, weight is Mr Chalamet and there were times in the film I thought I could see hints of a young Al Pacino, which is a good direction to be headed in, I think.
But what's most enjoyable about A Complete Unknown is that it doesn't matter that the puzzle isn't solved, or that this protean creature remains an enigma. The re-creation of those incredible times is what we've come for.
There may be an absence at the centre of the film but what we get instead is the mesmerising effect that Dylan has on other people.
The film takes plenty of time to linger on the faces of those who are watching and wondering: the beautiful Baez, the beautifully square Seeger, square-jawed Johnny Cash played with swagger by Boyd Holbrook, and all those audience members, going from devotion to betrayal the moment those first electric chords ring out.
A Complete Unknown is rated M for offensive language and is playing all over New Zealand from this weekend.
