Bob Dylan is so inherently unclassifiable that, when the great filmmaker Todd Haynes made a purposefully disjointed and elliptical film about the songwriter, he had to cast six actors to play Dylan, including Cate Blanchett, Heath Ledger, Richard Gere and an 11-year-old.

There would seem to be no greater fool’s errand than to try to plug Dylan into a conventional or pop star biopic, the sort of straightforward narrative that in recent years has won Oscar nominations for Joaquin Phoenix as Johnny Cash, Renée Zellweger as Judy Garland and Rami Malek as Freddie Mercury. There is nothing normal about Bob Dylan; how could you possibly make a normal movie about him? He is so unknowable that he has been mistaken for a vagrant by four generations in a row now.

“A Complete Unknown,” the new biopic of Dylan directed by James Mangold , turns Dylan’s stubborn insistence on hiding in plain sight, the impossibility of ever truly understanding him, into the film’s central tension. It’s a movie about a main character who keeps trying to run away from his own movie.

Most Dylan fans I know — a club that very much claims me as a member —have been dreading the movie since it was first announced, particularly when they learned that Timothée Chalamet, the elfish man in all those perfume ads in the corner of your browser windows, would be portraying him. But I am delighted to let everyone know that our fears were unfounded. The movie, and Chalamet’s devoted and truthful portrayal of Dylan, has constructed itself with a deliberate hole at its center. To paraphrase Haynes’s movie title, he’s not here. It’s as true to Dylan as if he were to play the part himself.

Dylan’s life and career have gone through countless permutations over the decades — it’s why Haynes cast so many actors to play him in the first place — but this movie focuses on just two periods in Dylan’s life: His emergence in Greenwich Village, with just a guitar and a notebook, looking for his hero Woody Guthrie, and his decision a few years later to “go electric” at the Newport Folk Festival, scandalizing the fans of the music he made into a global sensation and declaring his intention to leave them and go his own way.

The movie has all you’d expect from a traditional music biopic, from the love interest who takes a back seat to his music to the record executives who Aren’t Ready For Him to the brilliant artist scribbling the first lines of what will end up among the most famous songs of all time. It’s a respectful film whose main character has no interest in respect at all. Which is to say, my fellow Dylan fans, it does right by him. It’s an anti-biopic.

From the very first scenes, as played by Chalamet, this Dylan has no use for anything other than his own songs and his desperate, entirely internalized, need to keep making them. Everyone else, from his girlfriend (Elle Fanning) to Joan Baez (a terrific Monica Barbaro) to his mentor Pete Seeger (Edward Norton) to record executives to a generation looking for a political and cultural leader to, ultimately, his entire fan base, they’re all just obstacles that stand in his way. Chalamet’s Dylan is aloof, peevish and, frankly, kind of a jerk. Nearly everyone in his orbit suffers accordingly. The closer they try to get, the more Dylan vaporizes and wafts away.

But this doesn’t happen because of fame or riches or drugs, like it would in most music biopics. It happens because of who Dylan is. He just doesn’t care. He lives his life and writes his music and manages his career like a man who knows everyone around him is trying to write a biopic about him. And he is bound and determined not to let them.