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There's never been a shortage of people who dismiss Bob Dylan as a lousy singer. Or no singer at all, even.

"Critics have been giving me a hard time since day one," Dylan said in 2015. "Critics say I can't sing. I croak. Sound like a frog. Why don't critics say that same thing about Tom Waits? ... Why do I get special treatment?"

In an uncanny performance as the young Dylan in James Mangold's "A Complete Unknown," Timothee Chalamet manages to convey both the whooping energy of Dylan in his prime and the warm, seductive intimacy of his earliest albums, especially "The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan," a record now more than 60 years old. Director Mangold was wise in choosing not to make this movie a standard-issue Hollywood biopic; his focus is on the five years from 1961, when Dylan arrived in New York from his Minnesota hometown, to 1966, when a motorcycle crash derailed his touring career for several years. But even in that brief time, the young college dropout had already written and recorded such key songs of the onrushing '60s as "Blowin' in the Wind," "Mr. Tambourine Man" and "The Times They Are a-Changin'," and epochal albums like "Bringing It All Back Home," "Highway 61 Revisited" and the masterful "Blonde on Blonde."

One of the many laudable aspects of the picture is that the main actors do their own singing and playing. And they're good, all the more so without the distancing effect of post-production lip-synching. Monica Barbaro, playing folkie queen Joan Baez, captures the unexpected fuck-off side of Baez's personality ("You're kind of a jerk, Bob") and her voice melds memorably with Chalamet's in the folk-festival segment of the picture, in which Mangold's carefully contemplated camera strategies pull them (and us) more deeply than usual into the live-music experience.

As good as we already know he can be, Chalamet was completely prepared for this tricky role. He's a strong singer, and he's not just doing Dylan cosplay: He brings with him a persuasive tang of the '60s. His romantic interactions with Sylvie Russo (Elle Fanning in a moving performance as the artist who's being moved aside to make more room for Baez in Bob's upwardly mobile life) add emotional heft to the story of a man who's always been circumspect about his private life.

One of the best performances in the film is given by Edward Norton, who's cast against type as the balding, mild-mannered folk eminence Pete Seeger, a lifelong progressive political protestor who wrote or cowrote such actual popular hits as "If I Had a Hammer," "Turn! Turn! Turn!" and "Where Have All the Flowers Gone?" Seeger had mixed feelings about commercialized folk music, Bob didn't, and as Dylan's eyes started to develop a stoned squint, the two men's relationship began to fray.

Given all that was going on in Dylan's life in these years, the movie's list of characters is long and granular. Some of them obviously had to be slotted in: Bob's manager Albert Grossman (Dan Fogler), a figure so prominent in the pop-music industry that he was mocked in a 1966 Simon and Garfunkel track; Bob's legendary buddy Johnny Cash (Boyd Holbrook), who advised him to stick with his own sound ("Make some noise. Track some mud on the carpet."); and Woody Guthrie (Scoot McNairy), Dylan's fast-fading folk-music idol. But numerous less-heralded figures pass through, too: Al Kooper (Charlie Tahan), the young guitarist suddenly reassigned to organ at the recording session for "Like a Rolling Stone"; celebrated engineer Roy Halee (Jordan Goodsell), also a hit master for Simon and Garfunkel; and producer Tom Wilson (Eric Berryman), a rare Black studio pro who later recorded both the Mothers of Invention and the Velvet Underground. It was quite a time.

Although much of the film was shot in New Jersey, Mangold and his production team have done a top job in recreating Greenwich Village in the early '60s (the Chelsea Hotel on West 23rd Street, with its big El Quixote awning out front, is instantly convincing). And it was a clever move to tone down the usual overabundance of artificial period details and let the characters' clothing subtly orient the viewer in time. (If Bob is wearing tab collars and black leather jackets, it must be 1965.)

Even at the peak of his world-conquering stardom, it seems unlikely that many of Bob's fans back then would have imagined the man soldiering on to release more than 100 albums, and to still be touring today, at the age of 83. By now, there must be a string of Dylan warehouses snaking around this great land, packed with trophies and proclamations and other honorary bric-a-brac. Does he care? In 2016 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Unfortunately, he found himself unable to make it to the ceremony.

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To find out more about Kurt Loder and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators website at www.creators.com.

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