I’ve skipped a whole string of major biopics of famous musicians because they were only mediocre as films. Still, the great thing about the genre is that they’re easy to watch and you can be certain that at least the music is enjoyable. This one places the music in an even more central role than most and barely even attempts to be a biography of Bob Dylan. It covers only a tiny slice of the legendary singer’s life from 1961 to 1965 and aims to relate the mythos rather the facts. By its end, we don’t get to really know who Dylan is but we do get to understand why his rise as a folk singer was such a big deal and that’s a worthy story in of itself.

A penniless Bob Dylan arrives in New York City hoping to meet his idol Woody Guthrie. He finds Guthrie in a hospital dying slowly of Huntington’s disease and with him is the singer and activist Peter Seeger. Dylan impresses the both of them by performing a song he wrote for Guthrie, so Seeger puts him up in his house and introduces him to the folk music scene. During an open mic performance, Dylan briefly meets the already famous Joan Baez and attracts enough attention to be signed on to a label. But he is forced to perform only covers of traditional music and the album doesn’t sell well. He starts dating Sylvie Russo after meeting her in a church concert and moves into her apartment. She supports his music but becomes aware that his stories of his past are made up. During the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, Baez finds Dylan performing original music with lyrics that capture the anxiety of the time and impetuously begins an affair with him. At the Newport Folk Festival, Baez invites Dylan to perform onstage with her, an event that causes him to shoot to true superstardom.

Even for those who aren’t music afficionados like me, there are plenty of familiar songs in here to have a good time. It’s flabbergasting that Timothy Chalamet learned to sing and play the instruments himself in order to portray Dylan and actually performed live while filming the scenes. Though we don’t get full versions of the songs, we do get many performances here covering all of the major ones so this is definitely a biopic that knows to put the music itself at its center. More interestingly, the film places each song in the context of when they were written. So while others were singing upbeat songs about the land and the people, Dylan was singing about bombs and killing as a direct reference to events at the time. When he belts out the lyrics of The Times They Are A-Changin’, you intuitively understand why he instantly captured the hearts of the audience. For those of us who were born well after the peak of Dylan’s fame and for whom his greatest hits are overly familiar, this film encourages us to really pay attention to what he is singing and how it would feel like for listeners of that era to hear them for the first time. This perfectly sets the stage to explain why his subsequent turn away from folk music and a reduced emphasis on political activism was considered such a betrayal.

Unfortunately this so-called betrayal is still not terribly salient to non music fans. For the rest of us, there’s the romantic angle as Dylan has an on-again, off-again affair with Baez while Russo gradually realizes that Dylan is getting far too famous for their relationship to last. It’s entertaining but shallow. A more interesting theme is that Bob Dylan is deliberately curated persona. He left behind his old name and background to arrive in New York as a completely new person tailored to succeed in the local music scene. So even Russo who has been his girlfriend for years never gets to know his real family and when Baez asks him how he learned to play the guitar, he cooks up a bullshit story about learning by himself. This film never gives us a look behind the curtain so it effectively takes the position that anyone can choose to reinvent themselves if they want to. Fair enough, but that gives this film little material to use. Who the real Bob Dylan is remains as much a mystery at the end of the film as when he first appears. Given the title, I have to assume that this is exactly as intended.

This film was made with Dylan’s full cooperation so this should be pretty much how he wants himself to be presented and remembered. It especially plays up his songwriting genius, so much so that the women in his life are left speechless and instantly forgive the times when he’s a bit of an asshole. It rearranges different parts of his life to make for a better story and even leaves out the relationship with the woman who would become his first wife. With all that, it’s too superficial to qualify as a great film. Yet Dylan truly is such a genius and the performances in here are so good, recreating him in his prime, that this probably something you should watch anyway.