James Mangold has tried his hand before at undertaking a full scale music biopic. Twenty years on from ‘Walk the Line’, Johnny Cash appears again here in this impressive Bob Dylan story, though here Cash is very much a supporting character, alongside Joan Baez, in an attempt to go against the grain of what a Dylan biopic might be expected to do, namely, paint a picture of the artist as an enigma. The title may be ‘A Complete Unknown’, but Mangold focuses on the way Dylan revolutionized the American music scene between 1961 and 1965 by first standing in the tradition of Woody Guthrie and becoming a talented young folk musician to then embracing blues and electric guitar, which from the point of view of his folk peers was the ultimate betrayal.

Yet the film does have an enigma at its heart in terms of the way Dylan was becoming the antithesis of what his introverted and shy demeanour would suggest he really wanted, namely, becoming a superstar. Fame seems to attach itself to Dylan, played with distinction by Timothée Chalamet and where the singing we hear throughout this musical journey is such a good impersonation that it came as a surprise to me to learn afterwards that Chalamet performed all the numbers himself. Dylan comes across as someone who understands himself better than we do, and it is the burden of fame that is the more riveting aspect of this musical which bears more than a passing resemblance to ‘Jesus Christ Superstar’ in its exploration of reluctant messiah.

Dylan is torn between two different forces at work – not the divine vs. human of Christology, but in the cauldron of revolutionary 60s America Dylan’s embracing of the dynamism wrought by rock and roll is enough of a sacrilege to ensure that he is cast off, rejected, effectively crucified on the pillar of his own musical integrity, which paradoxically includes the need to constantly reinvent himself. Most musical biopics have the need to show the rise and fall of their hero, and how rejection catapulted them into more hungry and committed creative artists.

Here, curiously, Dylan’s rise is meteoric, and even when he is rejected, and literally labelled as Judas at the Newport Folk Festival, Dylan is untouched and untroubled. He procures enemies along the way, but this only enhances his sense of mission and vocation, and turns him into a more docetic Christ-figure than the one we might have expected all along.