The folk faithful had come to Newport hoping to catch Dylan perform songs like The Times They Are A-Changin’ or A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall. It was Dylan the acoustic balladeer and heir apparent to Woody Guthrie they wanted. Not some wayfaring stranger with a Stratocaster. But Dylan launching into his set with the words, I ain’t gonna work on Maggie’s Farm no more, was an emphatic declaration of independence. The traditionalists saw it as a betrayal, a rejection of his roots. When Dylan returned with an acoustic Gibson for the encore, the performance of It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue felt like a farewell to folk. As Elijah Wald wrote in Dylan Goes Electric! (the book that inspired Mangold’s film), Dylan’s three-song electric set sparked “the end of the folk revival as a mass movement and the birth of rock as the mature artistic voice of a generation.”

Mangold’s dramatization of this storied moment in music history is electrifying in an otherwise conventional portrait of an unconventional artist. A Complete Unknown doesn’t look to unmask Dylan the artist or decode his genius as much as echo what it must have felt like to populate his orbit. There is little enjoyment to be had here besides the sugar rush of watching glorified karaoke of early Dylan songs performed by a competent tribute act. Much of the film is made up of reaction clips of dewy-eyed onlookers watching on as if already aware of his significance to music decades into the future. From the moment a young Dylan arrives in New York, he is framed as a fully-formed artist. From the moment he takes the stage at the Gaslight Cafe for the first time, he holds everyone in his thrall. From there, every performance cuts to peers standing in awe from the wings, to hypnotised audiences, to tickled but frustrated lovers, to enthusiastic record execs making prescient statements (“This is going to piss some people off.”)

Committed though Chalamet is to the role, the acting veers too close to dress-up, to hollow impersonation. He mimics that nasal twang of Dylan’s emotive rasp that Joyce Carol Oates once likened to sandpaper singing. He nails that boyish smirk and charm that disarmed audiences. But he plays Dylan like a series of bullet points rather than an actual person. Embodying a musician who tended to withdraw into himself is a challenge Chalamet strains to overcome. The performance neither gets inside the man nor his music. Compare this to Monica Barbaro as Joan Baez: she may not copy that fluttery vibrato to the letter but her voice pierces with the same clarity and purpose. While operating from the baseline suggested in the title that myth and mystery overshadowed the sobering reality, the film takes so little risks it becomes an antithesis to the rebel spirit of its subject and the evocative imagery of his lyrics. It has no direction home.

Wald’s words furnish on screen a grainy, hyperreal snapshot of Greenwich Village as New York’s folk incubator. But this place that was once wonderfully alive and giddy feels like a Las Vegas mock-up. McCarthyism had left behind a climate of fear and paranoia, the civil rights movement was fighting to break an entrenched system of racial discrimination, and US troops were being moved into Vietnam. Every newspaper headline was a song waiting to be written. Folk music was enjoying a revival when a 19-year-old Dylan rolled into its epicentre in search of his idol Woody Guthrie — or rather the mythic figure from his memoir Bound for Glory. In a heartfelt moment, the film imagines Dylan debuting “Song to Woody” before a bedridden Guthrie ailing from Huntington’s disease in a New Jersey hospital. With a smile on his face and a knock on the bedside table, Guthrie expresses his warm approval of the young artist. This being a Dylan film, we only get to see Guthrie the patient, not the performer.

To a young Dylan, the fascination was with Guthrie the dustbowl troubadour than the radical activist whose guitar bore the sticker, “This Machine Kills Fascists.” Dylan’s own political awakening was ignited by girlfriend Suze Rotolo, fictionalised as Sylvie Russo (Elle Fanning) in the film. Rotolo introduced him to Arthur Rimbaud, took him to Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) meetings and helped him push past his comfort zone as a songwriter. When the two move into an apartment together, the film shows Dylan truly finding his voice. Blowin’ in the Wind and Masters of War emerged as galvanizing anthems and urgent calls to conscience. As the film condenses the timeline, Dylan’s sense of righteous justice however gets watered down and his activism gets lost in the ellipses with other subplots leading up to Newport 1965. There is no place here for his performance at the 1963 March on Washington shortly before Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech.

Factualists and quibblers are sure to view parts of Mangold’s film as fan fiction, whether it is Dylan purchasing a police whistle on the street on his way to a Highway 61 session, Baez hooking up with Dylan after seeing him perform “Masters of War” on an anxious night at the peak of the Cuban Missile Crisis or drunk pen pal Johnny Cash (Boyd Holbrook playing a caricature version) encouraging Dylan to rock and roll. Among the more agreeable inventions is a scene where Dylan jams with a Mississippi bluesman (played by Muddy Waters’ son Big Bill Morganfield) and Seeger joins them with his banjo on the folk music TV show Rainbow Quest. Among the more laughable inventions is a love triangle between Dylan, Baez and Russo that reaches a crossroads at Newport. In fact, Dylan at the time was in a relationship with Sara Lownds (whom he married a few months later) – one of the film’s more puzzling omissions.

Be it Bob polishing up Girl from the North Country in Seeger’s living room or Al Kooper improvising the organ riff of Like a Rolling Stone, the joy of watching a classic composed before our eyes make such moments of spontaneous creativity leap off the screen. True to a self-absorbed artist, Dylan draws songs as if from thin air late at night often without regard to his lovers sleeping. One night, Baez is awoken by Dylan finetuning It’s Alright, Ma on her guitar no less. While pointing to how prolific he was, the film doesn’t elide his prickly side. On the very first night he meets Baez, he describes her singing with a backhanded compliment – “a little too pretty.” The morning after hooking up, he likens her songs to “oil paintings at the dentist’s office.” If Rotolo/Russo is relegated to a pushover, Baez comes alive every time she calls him out (“You’re kind of an asshole, Bob”).

At 22, Dylan had become the spokesperson for his generation as the supreme protest singer – a label he didn’t care for because he thought it boxed him in. “It was not news that Dylan was the future,” Wald writes. “The news was that Seeger was the past.” But Seeger isn’t a Salieri figure to Dylan’s Mozart. The film shows him as a mentor-turned-mediator actively negotiating a generational clash. Folk purists were too attached to old acoustic traditions while the new generation were excited to welcome the revolutionary promise of rock ‘n’ roll. Dylan’s rebellion against a dogmatic collective echoes as a perennial conflict between individual expression and groupthink.

Wald presents another version where Seeger and the booing audience were hoping to foster a spirit of kinship and camaraderie while Dylan was the rebellious troubadour itching to go his own way. If Seeger could be cast as a “conservative gatekeeper”, Dylan could just as easily be cast as a “cynical careerist”. For “the Newport festivals were idealistic, communal gatherings, nurturing the growing counterculture, rehearsals for Woodstock and the Summer of Love, and the booing pilgrims were not rejecting that future; they were trying to protect it.” But “Dylan had looked the community in the eye and gunned it down in cold blood.” Years before Wald’s book, Todd Haynes’ film I’m Not There (2007) imagined the Newport apostasy in similar fashion with Cate Blanchett’s electric Dylan firing a machine gun into the crowd. To portray an artist who eluded his audience’s projections, the film splits Dylan into fictionalized identities: folkie, poet, outlaw, born-again Christian, prophet and iconoclast. Dylan was a musician who put on different masks at different times. And he was resistant to the idea of any single mask defining him. No film embodies the Dylan spirit and the patchwork tapestry of his work quite as persuasively.

Dylan was the posterboy for reinvention. Not just when it came to his music but also his life. Essential to his legend was the self-mythologizing. As seen in the film, he made up stories about joining a travelling carnival and being a circus hand. When Bob Neuwirth asks him about the kind of musician he wants to be, Bob replies: “Whatever it is they don’t want me to be.” This refusal to conform, to be pigeonholed, to belong to a single movement was a recurring theme of his life’s work. It was as if he became disenchanted with his own songs as soon as the audience began to sing along. In that context, It Ain’t Me, Babe is Dylan not just confessing his failings to a lover but rejecting the public expectations thrust upon him. “I’m not the one you want, babe. I’m not the one you need.”

Prahlad Srihari is a film and pop culture writer. He lives in Bangalore.