Bob Dylan broke the rules. ‘A Complete Unknown’ follows them.

The gift of Bob Dylan’s music is to make the world seem weirder, or rather to reveal the world to be as weird as it really is. He sings about life as a stream of confused signs and sensations, some real and some not, that carry meaning beyond words. Even at his toughest, he whips out an anti-narrative: You shouldn’t simplify, classify, categorize.

A complete unknownJames Mangold’s biopic focused on the bard’s early career understands this – and betrays it. The film portrays Dylan as a prophet who brings independence and idiosyncrasy to a world of rule enforcers and followers. Timothée Chalamet does an excellent job of finding Dylan’s balance between aloofness and humanity. Yet no film about unconventionality should be as mildly conventional as this one.

The problem starts at the conception level. Mangold has chosen to examine the most chewed chapters of Dylan’s career: his early days in the New York City folk scene, beginning in 1961 and leading up to the Newport Folk Festival in 1965, where he shocked acoustic guitar purists by going electric. A novelty cap on his head, Dylan blows into Greenwich Village at the start of the film, plays around and quickly wins the admiration of his idols—Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Johnny Cash—as well as the scene’s rising star, Joan Baez. Rebellion brings recognition, which brings public expectations, which brings more rebellion: a cycle true to Dylan’s life, but also that of many past iconoclasts portrayed on film.

Mangold knows the rules of biopics well; his 2005 cash exploration, Walk the Lineset the modern template for how to bend a complex individual’s life into a satisfying arc. Here, the director and his co-writer, Jay Cocks, deviate from the template in one exciting way. Dylan’s habit of lying and misleading has made the question of who the born Robert Zimmerman really is and why he does what he does one of music’s enduring mysteries. Instead of trying to crack the case with backstories that provide psychological cause and effect, A complete unknown just leaves Dylan…unknown. When he tells Baez that he used to be a carnie, she angrily replies that he’s full of it. He may well be. But he expresses an idea that he confesses to in an important part of the dialogue: To succeed on stage, you must inspire the same fascination as a freak show.

Read: Bob Dylan reveals himself through 66 songs

Chalamet does just that. He plays Dylan with heavy-lidded silence, making him seem perpetually on the verge of dozing off and mumbling as if in a dream. The film overflows with performance scenes in which Chalamet captures Dylan’s controlled erraticness and sings in a way that spins folk conventions into a galactic spiral of emotion. The real-life Dylan of the 1960s was a bit lighter and funnier than the solemn figure Chalamet portrays, but his jocular soul occasionally flashes through, like when he announces himself as God and then bursts into laughter. And while Dylan himself had some input into the film, Chalamet doesn’t dull the artist’s cruel edge; at one point, glassy anger in his eyes, he tells Baez that her songs are rather like paintings in a dentist’s office.

Unfortunately, the rest of the film has the same antiseptic quality that Dylan stood against. New York looks as scenic and cheerful as an amusement park. Dylan’s romance with Sylvie Russo—a fictional version of his real-life girlfriend Suze Rotolo, played by Elle Fanning—seems to exist to provide trivia about Dylan’s love songs. Historical giants are sketched in 2-D: Ed Norton’s Seeger is a gentle idealist with a touch of cunning; Monica Barbaros Baez is full of confidence, except when she’s completely insecure. Most annoying are the groan-worthy winks to the audience. “Be careful with that thing!” Seeger exhorts as Dylan rides his motorcycle a few years before the singer’s career-changing, still-mysterious crashes in 1966.

Thanks to Chalamet’s performance, the film’s coziness is not completely fatal to the viewing experience. But if A complete unknown is Hollywood’s grand, Oscar-baiting summation of Dylan’s legacy, the implication is sad: Even as it tries to celebrate originality, the entertainment industry insists on predictability. The film doesn’t have to be an art-house puzzle – Todd Haynes already took that approach to Dylan in 2007 with I’m not there– but a fluffier, more naturalistic version would have suited its subject better. At least the film conveys one true idea: worshiping an artist is different from listening to what they have to say.