The new Bob Dylan biopic, A Complete Unknown, is said to be based on Dylan Goes Electric!, a 2015 book by the accomplished musician and prolific writer Elijah Wald. On the eve of the film’s release in December, Dylan himself posted a rare comment on X praising the acting of Timothée Chalamet (who plays the lead role), and extolling Wald’s book as “a fantastic retelling of events from the early ’60s that led up to the fiasco at Newport.” Notably, Dylan did not extol the film itself. Instead, the post ends with “After you’ve seen the movie read the book.”

I’ve done both, and if I were James Mangold, the film’s writer-director, I’d go easy on the comparison. A Complete Unknown traces the period from January 1961, when 19-year-old Robert Allen Zimmerman trekked from Minnesota to New York City in search of his vagabond folk-singing hero Woody Guthrie (played by Scoot McNairy), to July 1965, when now-music star Bob Dylan shook up the Newport Folk Festival, ostensibly by playing with an electrified blues band. It is necessary for biopics to simplify, but that can be hard to do when faced with a firmly entrenched myth.

The myth, in brief, is that by plugging in a Fender Stratocaster and playing his famous put-down song “Maggie’s Farm,” Dylan stormed the Bastille of postwar America and sparked the revolution of New