In one of the many incandescent and finely layered scenes that make up “A complete stranger“, James MangoldThe haunting, offbeat drama about Bob Dylan’s early years, we watch Dylan (Timothée Chalamet) and Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro), who were involved musically and romantically, performed as a duo at the Newport Folk Festival in 1964. They sang Dylan’s “It Ain’t Me Babe” and the way their voices blended together (their smiles too) creates a sound so pure that it seems lit by the sun. Mangold lets the song continue in its entirety, as he does with many songs in “A Complete Unknown,” so that they literally become the story the film is telling.

This issue is like a shimmering dream, but part of it is the drama unfolding underneath. Baez, at this point, has had enough of Dylan. He’s a brooding, self-centered folk celebrity hipster poet, always putting himself at the center of things (while always looking too cool to be there). And since Joan herself, with that quavering soprano, is a fierce and famous client in her own right, she’s tired of being treated like Dylan’s accessory. The song they sing expresses how they feel about each other (“It’s not me, baby,/It’s not me you’re looking for, baby”). Yet they invest it with so much passion that it sounds like a romance. (Bob’s other girlfriend, played by Elle Fanning, is so taken by the singers’ relationship that she turns away from the stage in tears.) Folk music is rooted in a devotion to the world, but at this point— there, what Dylan and Baez are. singing is devotion to oneself: the new world that is arriving. That’s why the scene makes your heart explode and your head spin at the same time.

“A Complete Unknown” is a drama of scruffy naturalism, with a plot that doesn’t take place so much in the company of its legendary café troubadour hero with curly hair and sunglasses. Yet the sensation – the effect – is that of a musical. One might assume that this could be true of any classic rock biopic, but in this case the film, with its beautifully random song cycle structure, is really about Dylan. And his music and how music changed everything. Each new song is a dramatic episode, whether it’s Dylan performing “Masters of War” at the Gaslight Café right after the Cuban Missile Crisis or trying out “Blowin’ in the Wind” with Baez in his living room or to sing “The Times They Are”. A-Changin'” in Newport, where the audience, at the end, sings along as if it were a song they’ve always known.

Dylan, played by Chalamet with a frog in his throat and a sly calmness so authentic that it disarms and then floors you, wanders from cramped bohemian apartments to recording studios via concert stages and chic parties, always returning to the colorful squalor of Greenwich Village. (played by a less than convincing Jersey City man), hooking up with the right one. It slips into the connections and then, just as quickly, comes out. But that’s because music is his only true lover. The songs Dylan composed, scribbling lyrics on notepads, often in the wee hours of the morning, consumed and defined him. And “A Complete Unknown” explores the elemental power of what Dylan created during this period, launching songs through the ages as if he shot them. out ages. The fact that the Dylan we see is something of a cad is part of the power of the film. It’s ruthlessly honest about what an obsessive artist really is.

We meet him in 1961, when he was a 19-year-old hitchhiking from Minnesota. He is dropped off in New York on a cold winter day, wearing his cap, coat, scarf and backpack, carrying the guitar case that seems to be part of him, and he immediately heads to the hospital in New Jersey where Woody Guthrie (Scoot McNairy) lies in bed, unable to speak due to the ravages of Huntington’s disease. Guthrie’s buddy Pete Seeger (Edward Norton) visits him, and Bob enters the room with a questioning look. But he is impressed. It was Guthrie’s lilting, drawling music that set the template for what he does.

As Dylan takes out his guitar and plays “Song to Woody,” something happens that I wouldn’t hesitate to call magical. Chalamet, singing in a nasal and slightly tense voice, his tone as firm as his gaze, intones the words as if they were an incantation… and at that moment, he becomes Bob Dylan. The voice, the harsh frankness, the spiritual harshness that melts into something lyrical, it’s all there.

Bob de Chalamet doesn’t say much; he tends to speak in five-word gnomic phrases. But that’s because, in his mind, he’s already gotten over the malarkey that is human communication. He doesn’t have much use for it. It’s plugged into something more timeless. And Chalamet rises to the challenge of capturing the prickly charisma of Dylan’s inchoate, anti-matter, read-between-the-lines personality. It’s a captivating performance that’s true to Dylan and, just as importantly, true to the logic of the films. We look at this mysterious young man, who lights up a room when he sings, and like everyone around him, we want to know what motivates him.

The screenplay, by Mangold and Jay Cocks, is delicately crafted so that all the points covered by a conventional biopic are present: the way Dylan, in Folk City, captivated audiences in the Village of the early ’60s as well as New York Times; his push-pull bond with Baez and the softer connection he forms with Sylvie, Fanning’s politics (the film’s version is the same in everything except Suze Rotolo’s name); the deal he makes with cunning manager Albert Grossman (Dan Fogler); and the camaraderie he forges with Johnny Cash (Boyd Holbrook), a country newcomer who fuels Dylan’s bad boy impulses, and with banjo-wielding Seeger, played with perfect whimsy by Norton as ‘a character with sparkling eyes, really folk holy utopian activist.

Dylan himself is steeped in folk music, but he is not a folk purist. He sees what’s happening that Seeger can’t: the personal infatuation of the new pop audience. (Seeger does not realize that this narcissism will kill his proletarian dream.) The story told by “A Complete Unknown” is how Dylan moves away from the “purity” of folk music because his music begins to open up to a richer, bolder music, a more majestic purity: the need to reflect the world he sees around him.

That’s why he’s going electric. This will upset true believers, like Newport Folk Festival organizing guru Alan Lomax (Norbert Leo Butz), but it is Dylan’s destiny as an artist to venture into uncharted territory and do it by writing. some of the most exciting and propulsive rock. ‘n’ roll ever recorded (“Subterranean Homesick Blues”) and some of the most sublime (“Like a Rolling Stone”).

This transformation was brilliantly covered in Martin Scorsese’s great 2005 documentary “No Direction Home.” But “A Complete Unknown,” tied to Chalamet’s haunting performance — sometimes hooded, sometimes open, sometimes desperate, sometimes fueled by rebellious vibes — captures something the documentary didn’t: the anguish in the heart of Dylan and the consequences it took on him personally. . To make this change in his music and in the world, he had to do more than confront an audience of screaming, betrayed fans in Newport. He had to face the cosmic forces that told him no and replace doubt with faith. That’s what Dylan’s music has always been: the sound of belief illuminating the darkness. As we watch “A Complete Unknown,” his journey toward the light becomes ours.