It’s a cold winter morning in New York, ‘every artery of the city… snow-packed’. A corduroyed, scraggy young man, guitar in hand, bobs through Greenwich Village. The street is peopled with ‘salesmen in rabbit fur earmuffs hawking gimmicks, chestnut vendors’. The opening shot of A Complete Unknown, the Bob Dylan biopic directed by James Mangold (of Walk the Line fame), is an uncannily accurate visual reproduction of the scene-setting opening chapter of Dylan’s own memoir of the ‘early years’ of his career, Chronicles: Volume One (we are still waiting for Volume Two), from which those lines are taken, down to the rabbit fur earmuffs and ‘steam rising out of manholes’. Dylan’s face is set into a curious mix of self-possession – there’s that mote of arrogance – and the ever-so-slightly hooded eyes take it all in, laser someone, something, somewhere in the middle distance. ‘My mind was strong like a trap,’ writes Dylan about his mental state in those first few weeks after his arrival in New York from his home state of Minnesota. Timothée Chalamet captures unerringly well something of that quality Dylan put down in words decades on.

What follows is a compressed history of the years that followed, from 1961 to 1965, which chart Dylan’s rise from folk troubadour tribute act to electrified and electrifying rock god. The narrative compression is strikingly like Chronicles, which charts quite a lot of the action of A Complete Unknown, and in which Dylan freely mixes up time and space, half-remembers a lot, makes up a little. The first Dylan song Chalamet sings is Song to Woody. He performs it to a bedbound, mute Woody Guthrie, the original folk troubadour, alongside Pete Seeger, practically folk royalty, son of the influential folklorist and musicologist Charlie Seeger. Now, that Dylan went to visit Guthrie at Greystone Hospital is true. That Guthrie was very ill is also true. He was suffering from the genetic disease Huntington’s chorea, having been diagnosed over a decade earlier. But that Bob Dylan played ‘Song to Woody’ to Guthrie is highly unlikely. In Dylan’s contribution to an audiobook released in 2014, a walking tour of New York titled My Name is New York: Ramblin’ Around Woody Guthrie’s Town, he reflects: ‘I was there more as a servant. I knew all his songs. I went there to sing him his songs. That’s all I went there to do and that’s all I did.’ All along, he wryly comments: ‘I knew that I wasn’t really the best at doing Woody Guthrie impressions.’

Seeger asks him why he’s come to see Woody – his response? ‘To catch a spark’, a straightforward reference to Dylan’s prose poem, Last Thoughts on Woody Guthrie, recited at a live performance in 1963 soon after Guthrie’s death. Dylan generates a picture of a young intelligence hunting down inspiration. All around him he sees a ‘sand-box world’, a society infected with the ‘bubblegum craze’. ‘Yer train engine fire needs a new spark to catch it,’ he admits. That spark is Guthrie’s music, the ‘mark of originality’ Dylan saw in him and attempted to ingest from his work. At the poem’s end, Dylan suddenly broadens out the poem’s perspective: ‘You’ll find God in the church of your choice. You’ll find Woody Guthrie in Brooklyn State Hospital… You’ll find them both in the Grand Canyon at sundown.’ This is a rough impression, in its vaunting geography and metaphorical scope, of Dylan’s singular capacity to reflect the entire panorama of American life, ‘from the grand Coulee Dam to the Capitol’, and to work his alchemy on it, his ability, as Greil Marcus puts it, ‘less to occupy a turning point in cultural space and time than to be that turning point’.

In 1963, Dylan submitted his own liner notes as a tribute to the guitarist Dave Glover, a friend of Dylan’s from his Minneapolis days. They are a manifesto for what Dylan went on to do next: ‘I gotta write my own feelings down the same way they did it before.’ The opening of A Complete Unknown neatly encapsulates a quality that has distinguished Dylan above his contemporaries for his decades. He has continually found ways to create the new from the old, sometimes the very old; the ‘old, weird America’, in Marcus’ haunting phrase. And so often, he has been ahead of the game: the artist who could make Blonde on Blonde with its ‘wild, mercury sound’ that marked a new chapter in the sonic history of rock and roll and, a year later, release John Wesley Harding, which is filled with sparse, chorusless ballads rich in biblical symbolism. The most remarkable examples of Dylan’s ability to move forwards by going back are his two albums from the early 1990s, Good as I Been to You and World Gone Wrong, which presaged his remarkable return to his highest peaks in Time out of Mind. These are two albums of covers of some of the oldest American songs in existence, songs rescued from the storm of America’s settlement and expansion. In Time out of Mind, Dylan mines this territory for all its worth: ‘Behind every beautiful thing, there’s been some kind of pain,’ Dylan sings, the pain of the lone pilgrim, who journeys on and is lost in America’s silent wilderness. In the same way, Dylan’s album of Sinatra covers, Shadows in the Night, is both a return to the music of his childhood, his first love, and signals the way to the triumphant Rough and Rowdy Ways, his last studio album, soaked in references to the American experience of the 40s, 50s and 60s. Dylan revisits, deploys, and reworks, an extraordinary range of that experience, allowing the listener to believe, looking back across the decades to a bygone era, that ‘all things lost are made good again’.

In this way, a Dylan-esque discipline motors the film – all the action is subordinated to the songs, the quality of the writing, and their emotional impact. Among many significant compressions in the storyline, the climax of the film – Dylan’s leather-jacketed performance of Like a Rolling Stone at the Newport Folk Festival, 1965 – is the most interesting. But the performance Chalamet gives, along with the infamous shout of ‘Judas’, is a reproduction of a concert Dylan gave in 1966 in Manchester’s Free Trade Hall. Dylan’s real-life performance at Newport is weird, waltzy and toned down. But Chalamet covers the Manchester version. And whereas, on the studio album, the song skips ahead breezily, perfectly balanced, Dylan’s performance in Manchester luxuriates in sonic violence, the guitar spangling up and down as Dylan elongates the lyrics, snarls and bites and crunches. This artful mixing up of the Dylan story brings us closer to the atmosphere of the early 1960s and the way Dylan moved through it and shaped it.

In A Complete Unknown, Mangold builds the action around two other key events in Dylan’s early career – the performances at the Gaslight Café, the club Dylan ‘wanted to play, needed to’, where his prodigious compositional talents were first recognised, and his celebrated 1964 performance at New York’s Philharmonic Hall, ‘a Dylan show unlike any we’d ever heard or heard about’, in the words of the critic Sean Wilentz. In prosaic terms, when Dylan got access to the Gaslight rota, he had made it as a commercial artist – he was paid $60 a week and could rent an apartment nearby. It was where he first made a proper living from performance. Two recordings survive of his performances at the Gaslight in 1962 and were released as a CD in 2005. His version of Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right rattles by: vicious, funny, accusing. It was released the following year in The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. The contrast is extraordinary, almost a new song altogether. Now the spurned lover is wounded to the core, his spine ram-rodded with steel. The guitar flutes plaintively below, all flow and direction. Dylan was already demonstrating a prodigious talent that would take him far beyond the confines of Greenwich Village.

At Philharmonic Hall in 1964, Dylan introduced the audience to songs that would make up the spine of the back end of his studio album Bringing It All Back Home, his first LP with electric backing, including Gates of Eden, It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding) and Mr. Tambourine Man. Dylan was beginning to operate on a different plane, twisting the structure of song into unconventional strange shapes. Who is addressing whom, who questions are directed at, who ‘Ma’ is, the identity of his muse: none is immediately apparent. And where Dylan’s voice is in all this, the man who just a couple of years before had proclaimed ‘I’ll know my song well before I start singing’, is unclear, disappearing beneath myriad metaphors and esoteric references. Wilentz, who attended the performance, reflected on the cumulative impact of the set: Dylan was showing that ‘the songs themselves were what mattered, their words and images alone. We in the audience were asking him to be a leader and more, but Dylan was slipping the yoke’. He was following his own path: to be ‘an artist writing and singing his songs’.

The discipline that runs through A Complete Unknown extends, rather cruelly, to its treatment of Dylan’s relationships, both with Sylvie Russo, a fictionalised version of the real-life Suze Rottolo, and the Queen of the Folk Revival, Joan Baez. They play out in contrast to the real action, Dylan’s evolution as a songwriter and the expansion of his talents. In this sense, the film is faithful to the atmosphere Dylan cultivates in Chronicles: Volume One when he recalls his formative relationships. The most vivid of his recollections of ‘Suze’ take in his first encounter with Brecht’s Threepenny Opera set to music by Kurt Weill. He writes: ‘She had been working behind the scenes in a musical production at the Theatre de Lys… I went there to wait for Suze and was aroused straight away by the raw intensity of the songs.’ He continues: ‘Every song seemed to come from some obscure tradition, seemed to have a pistol in its hip pocket, a club or a brickbat and they came at you in crutches, braces and wheelchairs.’ That’s as good a manifesto as I can think of for the kind of music Dylan went onto make. In Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde, he would create art music in a similar vein – a livid, witty, sarcastic portrayal of a world of outcasts, criminals and deposed kings and queens, paupers and fallen saints.

In Joan Baez, played magnificently by Monica Barbaro, Dylan, and Chalamet, finds an equal, who meets his match as a performer. In Chronicles, he writes: ‘There was no one in her class… I’d be scared to meet her.’ She was ‘beyond criticism, beyond category,’ he continues, ‘She was far off and unattainable – Cleopatra living in an Italian palace.’ Chalamet’s Dylan courts Baez in bluff and awkward style. Barbaro’s Baez is intrigued, rather than bowled over, and comes across as basically amused, and resolutely unphased by Dylan’s meanness and taciturnity. Baez inducts Dylan into the game he would make his own. But she knows her own game, too, and practically gets the final word in as the curtain closes on this chapter of Dylan’s story.

The title, A Complete Unknown, fits the story that Mangold (or Dylan?) wants to tell, and fits exquisitely into my own view of Dylan’s contribution and achievement. It’s never really been about him – he’s not that kind of artist. He is the man in the crowd, who sees everything, and has an eye for every detail. He is like Chaucer in his Canterbury Tales, who set out ‘to tell you all the condition of each of them [the pilgrims], so as it seemed me, and which they were and of what degree’. He is like Shakespeare, whom Goethe praised as the ‘greatest wanderer’. On witnessing a great Shakespeare play, ‘We experience the truth of life, and we do not know how.’ He has, like those two great artists, placed everything at our disposal. There is no stage of life he has not made hay with, no depth left unexplored, no peak unscaled. He also, like them, perches at the summit of an achievement, which puts the niceties of biography, what happened when and where and how, into a twilight. For nothing about Dylan’s early, middle, or later life is worth paying attention to as much as the music and the words he put together and made resonate. In the track ‘False Prophet’ on Rough and Rowdy Ways, Dylan reflects that he is ‘first among equals, second to none, the last of the best’. No other living artist has so successfully and for so long lit up the vastness of the American experiment, while drawing on older sources of wisdom, both from the Judaeo-Christian inheritance as it was transmitted down the centuries, and in the spirit of the songs once sung across the plains of Troy. A complete unknown, yes, but one who knew us all.