James Mangold’s A Complete Unknown rests on three fairly safe assumptions about our culture. First, that many people enjoy conventional biopics. Second, that many people enjoy the actor Timothée Chalamet. And third, that many people buy into the idea of Bob Dylan as a man of such inscrutable genius that he is beyond mortal ken. Therefore, it figures that A Complete Unknown, a highly typical biopic starring Chalamet as young Dylan, would be doing pretty well in theaters. Which it is.

But I dislike all of those things, so it also figures that I’m one of the naysayers who was quietly grousing to myself in the back row. It’s my experience that biopics, when they follow the genre formula, manage to avoid the most startling and illuminating aspects of any given human’s life in favor of serving some ideologically favored narrative the public is already presold on. And in that regard, A Complete Unknown can stand as Exhibit A.

With a script by Jay Cocks and director James Mangold, A Complete Unknown is based on the 2015 nonfiction book Dylan Goes Electric!: Newport, Seeger, Dylan, and the Night that Split the Sixties by Elijah Wald. So the material is already focused on the preferred section of Dylan’s life, the most legendary part. It starts when he arrives in New York City and sets out to visit the dying folk singer Woody Guthrie in the hospital, the hugely influential singer-songwriter who did so much to popularize folk music. It ends with Dylan’s famously controversial appearance at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival when he scandalized the folk music community by plugging in his electric guitar.

Slender mop-haired Chalamet looks enough like Dylan to pass and seems to have no trouble affecting Dylan’s flat, sullen stare, Guthrie-inspired nasal twang, and general air of enormous self-regard. To see how highly punchable a personality young Dylan was, you can watch him in all his bratty, puckish glory in D. A. Pennebaker’s landmark Direct Cinema documentary Bob Dylan: Dont Look Back (1967). It’s no accident that previews for A Complete Unknown heavily feature the far more lovable, direct, and outgoing character of Johnny Cash (played by Boyd Holbrook), making Cash’s exuberant affection and regard for Dylan a way to connect with the notoriously prickly and elusive star.

The women in Dylan’s life are represented by Monica Barbaro as Joan Baez, the beautiful “Queen of Folk” with the angelic voice whose turbulent relationship and collaboration with Dylan played out on and off the stage, and Elle Fanning as Sylvie Russo, a pseudonym for Suze Rotolo, Dylan’s girlfriend as he rose to fame. (Dylan, who contributed extensively to the screenwriting process, insisted Rotolo’s real name not be used.) Sara Lownds, Dylan’s first wife whom he married in 1965 and was already in his life at the time, isn’t portrayed at all in order to throw the emphasis onto the famous relationship with Baez that was a factor in breaking up Dylan and Russo/Rotolo.

Poor Elle Fanning is stuck with the weepy woman-left-behind role so typical of male star bios. It’s a shame, because Rotolo was an interesting person, an artist and teacher, the daughter of Communist Party members and heavily involved in politics in ways that were a big influence on Dylan’s songwriting. Her political involvement is glancingly referenced as she explains to Dylan what CORE means (Congress of Racial Equality) on her way to a meeting, but the civil rights movement and the surge of left-wing organizing in Dylan’s milieu is barely touched upon.

Plus there are the usual biopic absurdities in clumsily mashing together big public events and key moments in private relationships, as when Dylan is wowing the crowd with “The Times They Are a-Changin’” and Russo is in the crowd watching and crying because Dylan’s life is also a-changin’ and pretty soon he’ll be a-leavin’ her.

Dylan’s ascent to extraordinary stardom was rapid, though not as rapid as it is represented in the film, in which everyone who hears the teenage Dylan perform for the first time is poleaxed by his brilliance. Surely it would’ve been both more interesting and more accurate to show scenes in which, according to David Browne in his recent book Talkin’ Greenwich Village: The Heady Rise and Slow Fall of America’s Bohemian Music Capital, he didn’t go over well at all because of “how jarring Dylan’s voice, guitar playing and early repertoire were” in the folk scene at the time:

[E]arly Dylan gigs found him “awkward and out of place one moment, assured and in command the next,” with a co-manager of the Gaslight [Café] saying he was initially “disastrous” and a Daily News reporter saying he “left the stage to the sound of perhaps one hand clapping.”

Instead, the film shows Dylan arriving in New York City and the next thing you know a Dave Van Ronk–like individual, never named but identifiable if you know what to look for, is already his pal, tipping him off about where to find Dylan’s idol Woody Guthrie. Guthrie and Pete Seeger, both instantly wowed, become Dylan’s mentors, and this is all happening on the same day as far as you can tell. There’s a stripped-down quality to these early scenes, suggesting that other than Seeger and Baez, Dylan is the only titan in the Greenwich Village folk scene, which was most definitely not the case. How about Odetta, Phil Ochs, Josh White, the Clancy Brothers, Joni Mitchell, Peter, Paul and Mary, and so many others appearing at Gerde’s Folk City, the Gaslight Café, Café Wha?, and the Bitter End? Check out the Coen brothers’ Inside Llewyn Davis (2013) for a much stronger sense of the top talent surging through the clubs and cafes, broke young singers and songwriters couch-surfing and playing for peanuts and eyeing each other jealously to see who was going to break into the big time.

Seeger, the ultimate folk music stalwart and social justice activist, is played by Edward Norton, who doesn’t look like the tall, thin, stork-like Seeger but still conveys Seeger’s sunny squareness that had a steel spine running through it. His defiance of the House Un-American Activities Committee authorities blacklisting him is typical in its sweetness, idealism, and implacability — he offered to sing them a folk song, the very thing that brought his Communist Party membership to the fore in the first place. But this is Dylan’s biopic, so that means Seeger gets sacrificed, looking ever more clueless and obsolete as the kid he mentored pulls away to pioneer folk-rock music.

Black performers keep appearing in the film only to be shunted aside by the focus on, say, Dylan first chatting up Russo, or Dylan pulling focus as a performer. It happens enough times that I began to think it might be a real motif, an attempt to represent how black talent got pillaged and deliberately obscured by white talent. But at the same time, it’s so vaguely handled by director Mangold, it’s not at all clear he’s doing it intentionally.

What he is doing intentionally is embarrassing enough in the never-happened scene of Seeger hosting a TV show featuring a made-up character, black blues singer Jesse Moffette (played by real-life blues guitarist Big Bill Morganfield). Moffette is a replacement guest for the no-show Dylan. When Dylan arrives late, he joins Moffette and Seeger in an impromptu jam session, and Moffette’s approval of what Dylan is doing is meant to signify once again Dylan’s protean ability to cross musical lines. (That Seeger is also crossing musical lines, and on a banjo, no less, doesn’t get him any credit.)

Later, in the climactic Newport Folk Festival ’65 scene, when the “Dylan goes electric” experiment is getting booed by the crowd, Moffette is in the wings bopping along to the beat approvingly. There are repeated shots/countershots to reinforce this. And there I was throughout clutching my face in horror, thinking, “Oh no, not the Black Approval scene again!”

Once you become aware of how many scenes in American movies feature black characters who exist to legitimize the actions of white characters, through some godawful notion of essential black authenticity, you seem to see those scenes everywhere.

How Dylan actually put the pieces together of the star persona he created is only glancingly dealt with in the film. For some reason, the desire to answer the obvious question, “Who was that masked man?” never seems to get a lot of traction when it comes to Bob Dylan, not even in biopics. There are very brief challenges by Baez and Russo/Rotolo to Dylan’s “bullshit” stories he tells about, for example, his nonexistent carny past. Russo complains after getting a glimpse of Dylan’s childhood scrapbook that she doesn’t even know his actual given name, which turns out to be Robert Zimmerman. But Dylan bats this away easily with an irritable speech about how in America everyone makes up stuff about their pasts and can go on to be whoever they want to be.

Surely it would be fascinating to see formative scenes of young Robert Zimmerman — a middle-class Jewish kid from Minnesota, whose father, Abe, was a successful businessman working for Standard Oil until he suffered a disabling bout of polio and wound up running an appliance store with his brothers. As a kid, Robert wowed the relatives with his singing of “Accentuate the Positive” and as a teen, he was performing Little Richard covers with his band in high school, then going to college, living at a frat house, and gradually drifting away from rock and roll influences toward a commitment to folk music. In other words, Bob Dylan isn’t unknowable. He’s plenty knowable. You just have to want to know.

How about a biopic that deals with his heavy amphetamine use that was getting him through grueling touring schedules in the mid-1960s? Instead of just showing him looking cool riding off on his motorcycle, how about dealing with his serious motorcycle accident in 1966 and the two years he spent out of the public eye?  His conversion to evangelical Christianity and his gospel records? His complex relationship to his Jewish identity, including a trip to Israel in 1971 and support for the ultra-Orthodox Chabad-Lubavitch movement? His Great American Songbook covers? His Christmas album? His mostly mortifying career as a film actor and director? His hilariously zonked-out performance in a mob of singing stars doing “We Are the World,” the charitable sing-along vaguely in aid of Africa? His Never Ending Tour performances through the 2000s, supposedly because God told him to devote himself to touring?

Surely such a crazy American life merits a little attention in a biopic. At least Todd Haynes’s film I’m Not There (2007) attempted to grapple with the many-sidedness of Dylan, with six different actors playing aspects of his wild and wacky trip through the world. Though at the same time, it’s the film most devoted to the myth of Dylan’s incomprehensible vastness, the grandiose way he contains multitudes, including such public personae as the poet, the prophet, the outlaw, and the rock and roll martyr.

Dylan himself tends to be quite cooperative with the various movie projects that mythologize him as he would wish to be mythologized. And why not? Every new biopic or documentary tribute is a good excuse to crank up the old 1960s legends and the old hit songs like “Blowin’ in the Wind,” “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right,” “Like a Rolling Stone,” “Girl from the North Country,” “Mr Tambourine Man,” “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall.” And there’s always a new generation of Americans, it seems, that loves the whole romance of Dylan the untamable iconoclast who’s gotta follow his muse and looks cool kicking dust in the face of the old fogies of folk music.

But really, there’s no use hammering on the irony of this film’s approach, a rote and conventional biopic celebrating the unfathomable mystery of Dylan’s one-of-a-kind Nobel Prize–winning genius. It’s just what you’d expect from the genre.