James Mangold, an IP strip-miner with auteurist airs—he described 2017’s Logan as an attempt to “make an Ozu film with mutants”—has, with A Complete Unknown, made a Marvel movie with Bob Dylan: a hero’s journey propelled by daddy issues, festooned with product placement plus some Easter eggs thrown in for the realheads. It feels right that the words that knocked about in my mind after watching ACU weren’t “How many seas must a white dove sail?” or “Crimson flames tied through my ears” but a throwaway line delivered to Dylan by Boyd Holbrook’s campy, crapulous Johnny Cash at a motel parking lot before heading to the fateful 1965 Newport Folk Festival: “Want a Bugle?” Cash wasn’t at the festival that year, and General Mills’ beloved conoid snack didn’t even hit the national market until 1966, but no matter: Mangold’s authorized biopic is a MacDougal Street fairytale (shot in Jersey), a rags-to-rock farrago of contrivance and cliché that, like nearly all of Dylan’s exercises in brand extension, slips rather brilliantly outside the bounds of authenticity and artifice. Timothée Chalamet—in whom Hollywood, bereft of leading men under the age of thirty-five, has invested messianic hopes (not unlike the hopes placed on young Bobby by the folk revivalists, who received him as their Lisan al-Gaib)—may not channel Zimmy’s putrid mystique (the “unwashed phenomenon,” Joan Baez christened him), his rebarbative wit, his cold openheartedness, but Bob Dylan plays Timothée Chalamet with a compelling flatness, as a chimerical absence of a man going through the motions of so many color-graded memories that never happened. Almost everything in this movie is fake: the nose, the tidy love triangle (by the time Dylan plugged in at Newport he was living with Sara Lownds, already pregnant with their first child), the lack of political stakes, the harmonica that a moribund Woody Guthrie gives his false heir (his rightful successor is arguably Bruce Springsteen, soon to be portrayed by Jeremy Allen White). And why not? After all, as Dylan would growl some thirty-five years later, “All the truth in the world adds up to one big lie.” Maybe the opposite is true, too.