The biopic A Complete Unknown may bring Bob Dylan’s music to a new generation, but I wish it had given at least a nod in the direction of Dylan’s spiritual side.

While Timothée Chalomet evokes Dylan’s enigmatic persona impressively, one doesn’t feel particularly drawn to the young Bob Dylan, but rather to Pete Seeger, endearingly rendered by Ed Norton.

A Complete Unknown is beautifully filmed, whisking viewers into the 1960’s Greenwich Village folk scene while intimating from the get-go that the world it portrays is “rapidly aging.”

The small-town unknown with a guitar, a harmonica and a song for Woody Guthrie was about to lead a musical charge nobody saw coming.

Unless they were paying attention.

“But why would I want to know more about a guy who wants to be ‘whatever they don’t want me to be’?” a younger viewer complained to me, turned off by the character represented on screen. A Complete Unknown portrays Dylan as an opportunistic player (pun intended) without a shred of gratitude for people who recognized his gift and supported him when he needed it most.

And to be fair to the younger non-fan, I’m pretty sure the first time Dylan hit my radar he was wailing everybody must get stoned, and not quite of the rebellious generation who loved it, the song didn’t endear me to him. I gave Dylan a second look after Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door and Forever Young, but Dylan first mesmerized me when I heard Gotta Serve Somebody in 1979.

I was smitten by Dylan’s spiritual heart.

Flipping through a copy of TIME lying on the break room table at the Osco Drug Store where I was working, I came upon a photo of Dylan on stage while touring after the release of Slow Train Coming . “He sports a cross,” the reviewer sneered, and sure enough, a silver cross was visible between the lapels of Dylan’s open collar.

If Bob Dylan could draw snark from a reviewer for TIME, I was definitely intrigued. And since a record store was just around the corner from Osco, it wasn’t long before I had enough cash to tuck Slow Train Coming under my arm, take it home and play it for my husband. We wore that album out.

I was putting my husband through school during those days at Osco, and one evening while I waited in Southwest Missouri State’s library for him to finish class, I picked up a Bob Dylan biography and began learning whatever I could about the mysterious man behind lyrics that stabbed my heart.

I rifled through the Dylan section at the record store and made my way through the entire Dylan canon, one album (and one paycheck) at a time.

Listening to Dylan’s repertoire (I still have the vinyl albums, including that first one, where he wears the fisherman’s cap), I felt that Bob Dylan was not a guy with a conversion brought on overnight. It probably really was a slow train coming, not unlike the other iterations of the man who insisted on being true to whatever phase of contemplation life had brought him, whether his audience “stoned” him for it or not.

Here was a literate poet whose Jewish roots had left more scripture in his soul than perhaps even he realized during the self-absorbed days portrayed in A Complete Unknown. New and Old Testament reflections appear in even the earliest Dylan. The 1964 anthem The Times They Are-A Changin’ declared that “the first ones now will later be last” (Matthew 19:27-30), and in Masters of War (also 1964), Dylan sang, “Through many dark hour I been thinkin’ about this /That Jesus Christ was betrayed by a kiss.” All Along the Watchtower (1968) evokes a prophetic scene from Isaiah 21.

It may be that what would come to be known as Dylan’s three “gospel albums” (Slow Train Coming, Saved and Shot of Love) are the least enigmatic in his entire body of work. For a Bible reader like me every song rings clear as a bell (the lovely Ring Them Bells came later). In When He Returns Dylan sings:

Truth is an arrow and the gate is narrow that it passes through
He unleashed his power at an unknown hour that no one knew
How long can I listen to the lies of prejudice
How long can I stay drunk on fear out in the wilderness
Can I cast it aside, all this loyalty and this pride
Will I ever learn that there’ll be no peace, that the war won’t cease
Until he returns

I played that song for my preacher father, who mused, “He doesn’t pull any punches, does he!”

But my favorite Dylan song is the lyrical Every Grain of Sand, from Shot of Love, the third album of that trio:

I hear the ancient footsteps like the motion of the sea
Sometimes I turn, there’s someone there, other times it’s only me
I am hanging in the balance of the reality of man
Like every sparrow falling, like every grain of sand

In subsequent years, when the clarion voice of conversion became more lyrically veiled, some friends who had witnessed the devotion of my early Dylan obsession heckled me with I-told-you-so taunts about my “hero’s” feet of clay.

I respond that I love his music and admire his courage, but I never said Bob Dylan was my hero. I sense a spiritual soul in his music, even from the A Complete Unknown years and I’m not asking for anything more from him. No fan should.

Making Dylan be whatever you want him to be will set yourself up for disappointment as soon has he reveals that he’s not.

Maybe that’s what the line in the film was getting at. Just let him sing, and listen with your heart.

And Dylan’s spiritual side never disappeared from this music, for that matter. Read James 2:14-26 and listen to What Good Am I? If you don’t recognize your own two-faced heart and feel at least a little convicted, I’d be surprised. Then listen to Oh Mercy in its entirety and if you don’t see the trouble with today’s political climate flash before your eyes, pinch yourself to remind you the album was released in 1989.

And if Make You Feel My Love (1997) isn’t at least an echo of the suffering Christ then I might be as crazy as the fan who once picked through Dylan’s garbage to bolster his own media persona.

But I don’t think so:

I’d go hungry, I’d go black and blue
I’d go crawling down the avenue
Know there’s nothing that I wouldn’t do
To make you feel my love.

I understand that A Complete Unknown limits itself to a story about the mysterious songwriter from Hibbing, Minnesota who arrives in New York to serenade Woody Guthrie while making a name for himself by “going electric” at the Newport Folk Festival, forever changing the course of American popular music.

But I can’t help but be disappointed that there isn’t an inkling of the spiritual poet in the film.

After we’ve watched the young Dylan behave badly until we’re absolutely sick of him, (spoiler alert) he drives off on the motorcycle older fans all know will sideline him within a year. He visits Woody Guthrie’s hospital room and receives the dying troubadour’s silent blessing. And while an instrumental version of Like a Rolling Stone plays just before the credits roll, an epilogue begins to flash on screen. Bob Dylan is the only songwriter to receive a Nobel Prize for literature, we read at the conclusion: “He did not attend the ceremony.”

Accurate, of course, but to my mind unfair, considering the impression it leaves with younger viewers who know little or nothing of the body of work produced in the decades between the movie’s conclusion and the Nobel Prize.

But I suppose Dylan doesn’t mind. After all, Newport was but the first example of his being whatever “they” didn’t want him to be.

And nobody takes a back seat to Bob Dylan, even now.

It’s been one of the delights of my later years to discover that Bishop Robert Barron, whose work has been of immense spiritual help to me, also loves Dylan’s music.

“You have to read him as a spiritual poet,” Barron points out in the first of several YouTube videos he’s made to share his own enthusiasm for the songwriter who first arrested his attention when he was a teen.

Speaking of Dylan with journalist John Allen in To Light a Fire on the Earth: Proclaiming the Gospel in a Secular Age, Barron notes:

He’s Biblical. He’s a lot of things, of course, but above all, from beginning to end, he’s Biblical. He’s the one, perhaps more than anyone else in pop music, who brings the Biblical worldview into our time…it’s the Biblical take which drives his interest in sin, judgment, eternal life, and God.

“Not everyone who hears Dylan becomes a fan,” Barron continues, “but I got elected.”

“The beautiful always sends you,” he adds in a nod to theologian Hans urs Von Balthasar, Barron’s model for evangelization in general and for Christ in particular. “You’re sent on mission.”

I guess it’s fair to say that I “got elected” too.

Dylan’s poetry has so often pierced me with hope in the transcendent. In Christ, betrayed In the Garden but risen and returning and still able to melt proud hearts today. There is far more to Bob Dylan that what young viewers will take away from a couple of hours with A Complete Unknown.

Besides, I’d like to tell them, I’m not even thinking about the ever-changing “complete unknown” when I listen.

I’m thinking of the never-changing Singer who whispers signs of hope to those with ears to hear and who reveals the tenderness of his heart “in every sparrow falling, in every grain of sand.”