It's been 17 years since Jake Kasdan delivered the definitive, beat-by-beat parody of the popular music biopic with "Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story," but filmmakers keep churning out these cookie-cutter, rise-and-fall portraits of great artists. Even when done reasonably well, they're little more than jukebox musicals that play the greatest hits and misses of their subjects' lives. Worst of all, given that you need to license the songs from the artists or their estates, these subjects have creative control over their story –- i.e. they'll only get as ugly as the artist or their estate can bear.

This brings us to James Mangold's "A Complete Unknown." Mangold, who made one of the better music biopics of the 21st century in "Walk the Line," has wisely limited the scope of his Bob Dylan film to the artist's early-to-mid-1960s transformation from conscience-pricking folk singer to electric-guitar-wielding rock prophet. This...