I’m so burned out on musical biopics. And it’s only a marginal relief to know I’m not the only one.

Bob Marley: One Love was heavily promoted as a potential “Best of the Year” contender right up until it crashed and burned. Ditto for Back to Black. Maria barely even got a release in the US. The market has become so oversaturated and the formula so stale, Piece by Piece tried to shake things up by presenting Pharrell’s life story as a CGI Lego movie. Nobody saw it. We’ll see how Better Man works out, but it’s a movie portraying the life of Robbie Williams as a CGI mo-cap chimp — I don’t like those odds.

And now we’ve got A Complete Unknown, about the life and times of Bob Dylan. On the surface, it sounds like yet another stale overhyped musical biopic to throw on the pile. But there were some promising signs here nonetheless.

The big one was James Mangold as director/co-writer/producer. The guy’s a master, and I’ve yet to see a film from him that I couldn’t respect. And then of course we have Timothee Chalamet playing Dylan. Sure, Chalamet is overexposed, but he’s a more talented actor than he often gets credit for, and this is certainly an interesting choice in a career full of them. Also, while Bob Dylan has already been the subject of multiple films and documentaries, it makes a difference to have the man himself alive and on hand to consult and give the film his blessing. Dylan certainly didn’t have to do that, and gods know he’s past the point of any fucks left to give.

So, what have we got here? Well… it’s a musical biopic about Bob Dylan. More specifically, it’s about Dylan’s early years as an up-and-coming folk musician, right up until he started playing and recording with electric guitars, to the great frustration of folk music gatekeepers.

Put it this way: Early in the film, we meet Pete Seeger (here played by Edward Norton) while he’s on trial for contempt of Congress over “This Land is Your Land”, of all songs. (In fact, the song in question was actually “Wasn’t That a Time“.) In his own defense, Pete stands up and rails against censorship and the very notion of what is or isn’t acceptable music. At one point, he quotes his good friend Woody Guthrie (here played by Scoot McNairy) — to paraphrase, “only good can come from a good song.”

Cut to the climax of the movie, when this same Pete is doing everything he possibly can to try and shut down a Bob Dylan performance because he’s playing electric guitar really loudly at a folk music festival. Because Pete’s brand of folk music has fossilized and Bob’s revolutionary sound is the way of the future, you see. That’s pretty much what we’ve got with this movie.

When Bob and Pete first meet each other, Pete wants Bob to be the singer/songwriter that brings folk music to a new international young audience. When Bob meets Elle Fanning’s character (Sylvie Russo, a stand-in for Suze Rotolo, whose name was changed at Dylan’s request), she wants him to be a starving young artist who will grow into a politically active voice to fight for social change. When Bob meets Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro), she wants him to be the charismatic songwriter who can help take her career to the next level. And of course all the record executives only want Bob to make a lot of money.

To some extent, everybody wants Bob to be something they can control and profit from. And in due course, every one of them comes out looking like a heel as Bob outgrows them. Pretty much everybody in this movie comes out looking like an asshole, none more so than Bob Dylan himself. The one notable exception is Sylvie, who mostly comes out unsympathetic because she’s played as a paper-thin archetype we’ve seen too many times in too many other musical biopics.

At its heart and core, this is a movie about an artist who simply cannot be put into any one box. Dylan is here portrayed as chaos incarnate, someone who doesn’t care about genres or conventions or what anyone else wants from him. Hell, even Dylan himself doesn’t seem to know what he wants or why he does what he does. Bob Dylan writes songs and performs them because that’s what he’s good at and he’s incapable of doing anything else, that’s all there is to it.

Of course, the obvious flip side to that is that no man is an island, certainly not in showbiz. Dylan’s arrogance, his unpredictability, and his steadfast insistence on doing what everyone tells him not to do out of sheer spite all raise some interesting questions with regard to an artist’s relationship with those around him. Sure, it’s old hat to see a musician who doesn’t get along with his label, his manager, his bandmates, his girlfriend, and so on and so forth. But when a musician flat-out refuses to play a song for an audience that’s clamoring to hear it, that’s something else entirely. I get that Bob isn’t in this for the money or the fame or whatever. But if he’s not even making art for his audience, then what the hell is he really after?

With all of that said, there’s a massive drawback to having a protagonist who’s supposed to be a total cipher: We never really get to know him. That’s a pretty big problem in a genre built around the prospect of getting to intimately know our favorite industry legends. Then again, it’s a rather crucial part of the film’s central thesis that it takes a genius asshole who doesn’t give a fuck about arbitrary rules to change the game and create the next greatest thing.

Then again, the other big problem is that because the film can’t really commit to answering what the protagonist is, that directly leads to an identity crisis for the film itself. It’s like the film wants to be something else, but can’t decide on what exactly, so it settles on the same standard formula we’ve seen so many times in so many other biopics.

In fact, this movie keeps running into a common biopic problem, and it’s a major issue holding the film back from its full potential: None of the characters are as interesting as the protagonist. Bob Dylan is the compelling and multilayered lead, the love interests fluctuate in their attraction and compatibility with him, and literally every other fascinating historical figure in this picture (even Pete Seeger, to a lesser extent) is reduced to a cardboard cutout who only exists to either support Dylan or give him token resistance. Case in point: The old guard of folk music is here embodied by Alan Lomax (here portrayed by Norman Leo Butz), and his conflict with Dylan would be so much more engaging and dramatic if Alan wasn’t portrayed as a one-dimensional blowhard who crumpled at the least amount of pressure from Dylan.

Rolling Stone did a fantastic rundown in fact-checking the movie, counting over two dozen discrepancies in total. And at least one of those discrepancies came at the insistence of Bob Dylan himself. Reading through the list, it’s obvious that characters were cut and storylines were simplified in the interest of streamlining the story and cutting down for time and all that. These are common and harmless everyday adaptation tricks in the genre, but that’s just it. Even without knowing all these facts about Dylan, this still feels like it was made to fit the mold of so many other musical biopics that came before.

Then we have the cast, which is kind of a mixed bag. Edward Norton is genuinely compelling here, Monica Barbaro turns in a dynamic performance, and I loved Boyd Holbrook’s explosive take on Johnny Cash. Still, it was a shame to see Eriko Hatsune get so much screen time as Pete Seeger’s wife only to stand around and watch the other characters. And Elle Fanning is acting well within her wheelhouse because she doesn’t have much else to work with either.

Then there’s Timothee Chalamet. For all of Chalamet’s effort and talent, he could never quite blend into the role of Bob Dylan… except for the musical numbers. Gods almighty, that boy can play. He’s got the voice down, he’s got the guitar work down, he’s got that charisma onstage. It was hair-raising to watch Chalamet onscreen simply reading the lines and then immediately see Bob Fucking Dylan onstage with the world at his feet.

Ultimately, A Complete Unknown is a story about a musician with the talent and the vision to irrevocably change the world, even in the face of all his personal failings and everyone who tried to silence him. The big problem is, that’s literally every musical biopic ever made. I get how the movie is trying to one-up the formula by making it about how Bob Dylan was such an iconoclast who shut down everyone who ever tried to make him into something he wasn’t, but it simply isn’t enough. For a musician who’s already been the topic of so many movies, for a movie in a genre that’s already been done to death, and for an awards contender coming out in an overstuffed awards season, this isn’t enough.

Don’t get me wrong, the musical numbers are fantastic, we’ve got so many solid performances here, and the film makes the intended point. It’s certainly not a bad movie, but it isn’t good enough. (Hell, it’s not even the best biopic out right now — go check out The Fire Inside.)

I can certainly recommend giving the movie a look, but with greatly adjusted expectations.