An absorbing and triumphant biopic focusing on Bob Dylan's arrival in New York: BRIAN VINER reviews A Complete Unknown

A Complete Unknown (15, 140 minutes)

Verdict: A triumphant Bob Dylan biopic

Rating:

Bob Dylan fans will instantly recognise the title of James Mangold's splendid biopic, in which the great man is superbly played by Timothee Chalamet, as a line from Dylan's 1965 hit Like A Rolling Stone.

It could be, incidentally, that you don't think of Dylan as a 'great man'. 

Not everyone does. His voice has been described as 'a nasal, mumbling whine' and not all whines get better with age, yet at 83 he's still performing to adoring audiences.

Last month alone he played in Bournemouth, Liverpool, Edinburgh, Nottingham and Wolverhampton, before packing out the Royal Albert Hall for three nights.

Many of his most ardent admirers, the self-styled Dylanologists, are at least as old as he is. Yet now they find themselves at the centre of a most unlikely Venn Diagram, interlocking with the so-called Chalamaniacs. 

These are (mostly young) people who worship Chalamet and I have seen great shrieking hordes of them in action, screaming his name while all but tearing their hair out in a state of rapture.

A Complete Unknown targets both groups but if you fall into neither, don't let that put you off. 

Director and co-writer Mangold has crafted an absorbing film, which focuses on those few pivotal years between Dylan's arrival in New York City in 1961 as an anonymous teenage troubadour from Minnesota, and the night in 1965 'that split the Sixties' and marked a turning-point in popular music. 

That was the July evening when, to the horror of his fans, the acoustic folk-music hero took to the stage at the Newport Folk Festival in Rhode Island with a Fender Stratocaster guitar (now on display at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art) and an electric band.

The title is a perfect fit, not just because Dylan is a complete unknown at the beginning of the film but also, in a way, because we don't know him much better by the end of it. 

Mangold, in adapting Elijah Wald's fascinating 2015 book Dylan Goes Electric, barely even tries to delve into the singer-songwriter's mercurial personality. He is an enigma throughout. This movie is mainly about the music.

Chalamet, although a fair bit prettier than the young Dylan, captures him wonderfully. Most impressively he does all his own singing and playing, and so by all accounts do all the others cast as legendary figures of the era: Monica Barbaro as Dylan's lover Joan Baez, Boyd Holbrook as his roguish supporter Johnny Cash ('Your Freewheelin' album is my most prized possession,' he tells Dylan), and Edward Norton as Pete Seeger, the folk-revival figurehead whose eternal affability is tested almost to snapping point when his former protege rocks the 1965 festival in more ways than one.

The film begins with Dylan, newly arrived in Greenwich Village clutching only his guitar and a newspaper cutting about his hero, Woody Guthrie (Scott McNairy), taking a cab to New Jersey where the protest-music icon is hospitalised with a degenerative disease.

Within weeks of his hospital-room performance for Guthrie and Seeger, Dylan is a fixture on the Village folk scene, hailed by the New York Times as 'a cross between a choirboy and a beatnik', sleeping with Baez while living with his girlfriend (Elle Fanning as the thinly-disguised and long-suffering Suze Rotolo, here named Sylvie), roaring around dangerously on his motorbike and obsessively writing songs at all hours, with none of the above interrupting his 60-a-day cigarette habit.

Mangold (whose credits include the terrific 2005 Johnny Cash biopic Walk the Line) expertly sets all this in the context of the convulsive times, because indeed the times they were a changin'. 

The backdrop of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the assassination of JFK and the tumult over civil rights is reflected in Dylan's songs but does not define him. 

If anything he is indefinable, and of course his rebelliousness has never abated. When in 2016 he became the only singer-songwriter to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature, he blithely skipped the ceremony.

There are some strange omissions in the film: in the chronicling of all those social and political convulsions the Vietnam War is pretty much overlooked, as is Dylan's much-discussed use of drugs. 

But A Complete Unknown is a triumph, all the same, entertainingly reminding us that, love him or hate him, Dylan remains one of the most influential musicians of the last 70 years. And that Chalamet, aged 28, is much more than a pretty face.

A Complete Unknown opens across the UK on January 17.