A Complete Unknown looked for all the world like another hagiographic biopic of a musician who deserved better, but, much to my surprise at least, it’s a solid and at least somewhat balanced portrayal of a short window of Bob Dylan’s life. It’s well-paced, gets the right songs in the right places, and brings two outstanding supporting performances. It’s just unfortunate the guy playing Dylan is so tied up in an impersonation that the portrayal says nothing remotely insightful about the main character. (You can rent it on iTunes, Amazon, etc.; I received a review code from the studio’s publicity department.)

The story begins with Dylan’s (Timothée Chalamet) arrival in New York City, upon which he tracks down one of his idols, Woody Guthrie, by that point in hospital as Huntington’s Disease had affected his ability to control his muscles. Sitting by Guthrie’s bedside is Pete Seeger (Edward Norton), who invites Dylan to come stay with him and his wife Toshi (Eriko Hatsune, in the film’s most thankless role), where Pete quickly realizes that “Bobby” has some talent. We follow Dylan through little shows in New York City coffee houses and in slightly larger spaces where Seeger gets him on the billing – which is where he meets Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro) – and onwards and upwards until Dylan gets to play the Newport Folk Festival. His first two appearances there were huge successes, but when he returned as the headliner in 1965, at the point where he was incorporating more rock sounds and was about to release Highway 61, he found himself in conflict with the festival’s organizers and many fans while also at a major inflection point in his career.

A Complete Unknown dispenses with the music biopic trope of some sort of adversity – usually drugs or alcohol – for the subject to overcome before the triumphant conclusion, likely because Dylan simply hasn’t had anything like that. The dips in his career were far less dramatic; the biggest one is probably his flirtation with Christianity, leading to a trio of albums that are generally considered his weakest, and all of that is more than a decade after the time period of this film. Instead, the script just lets the natural vicissitudes of the life of a rising musician define the narrative arc, such as his on-again, off-again affairs with Sylvie Russo (Elle Fanning, playing a fictionalized version of Suze Rotolo) and with Baez, along with his conflicts with music industry suits and the Festival organizers. The slope of the curve is always positive, but there’s enough variation here to keep the story interesting – and the music doesn’t hurt.

That said, there’s a clear choice here to portray Bob Dylan as some sort of pop star, and it doesn’t exactly work with the source material. This is Bob Dylan, not just any songwriter or singer or musician. He won a Nobel Prize. He’s been covered by over 600 artists, running the gamut from Jimi Hendrix to Adele to Ministry to Bryan Ferry to XTC to the Ramons to Guns ‘N Roses to Van Morrison (with Them). He’s one of the most influential songwriters in the history of recorded music, but there’s very little to indicate that in A Complete Unknown. The portrayal here, which has fans recognizing him everywhere and hounding him in the streets, doesn’t even seem to line up with his commercial results in the film’s time period; his first album to reach the Billboard top ten came out in 1965, near the very end of the narrow window the movie covers. Maybe he had screaming groupies following him around, maybe he couldn’t go out in public to see his friend’s band play, but that doesn’t seem to jibe with the facts or Dylan’s persona.

I’m writing this just an hour or two after the Oscars ended, and although I haven’t seen The Brutalist to comment on whether Adrien Brody was deserving, I’m not upset that Chalamet didn’t win. He’s doing an extended impersonation, and in his case, it feels like Timothée Chalamet impersonating Bob Dylan impersonating Timothée Chalamet. The scene in the elevator when he meets Bobby Neuwirth for the first time is cringeworthy, as Chalamet is trying so hard to mimic Dylan’s voice and mannerisms that it comes off as bad parody; Richard Belzer never sank to such depths. Edward Norton and Monica Barbaro are both marvelous in their supporting roles, however, and while neither had much of a chance, especially not Norton, they really help A Complete Unknown keep its momentum and its general atmosphere, Norton – as charming as I’ve ever seen him – in the first half, Barbaro in the second. There’s also a brief cameo by James Austin Johnson as an emcee, which is a brilliant nod to Johnson’s impersonations of Dylan on Saturday Night Live.

The film also completely ignores Toshi Seeger, even though she was a significant figure in several of the events the movie depicts. She helped set up the original Newport Folk Festival; she produced and directed the TV series starring her husband on which Dylan appears in the movie; she later won an Emmy for a documentary about Pete’s career. Yet A Complete Unknown barely gives her any lines, and in most scenes she’s busy frowning or scowling, with a near-constant expression on her face like someone has placed a rotten onion just below her chin. The film has one nonwhite character of any significance at all, and she gets whitewashed out of the story. There are a lot of details here that are made up or combined into single events, typical artistic license in this kind of film, but the erasure of Toshi Seeger is almost unforgivable. (The New York Times’ obituary for her has more details on her life and legacy.)

The screenplay for A Complete Unknown, adapted from Elijah Wald’s book Dylan Goes Electric!,does veer enough from the clichés of the genre to maintain enough narrative greed to power through two-plus hours without a big dramatic twist to overcome my two pretty significant reservations about the film. Chalamet plays well and sings passably, even when imitating such an oft-imitated voice, and the performances around him hold him up in the moments when he descends too far into impersonation. I recommend it with the caveat that it could have been so much more, especially in terms of delving into Dylan’s character, perhaps in the hands of a different screenwriter and lead actor.