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“Joan is yours.” That’s what the email from director James Mangold to Monica Barbaro said. The actor had sent in her audition tape for the role of folk legend Joan Baez in “A Complete Unknown,” the story of Bob Dylan’s arrival on the folk scene. After learning that she’d made the shortlist, Barbaro was to meet with Mangold in March 2020, but it wasn’t until after the pandemic, in 2023, that they finally did.
The good news? She’d got the part. The bad news? Well, she got the part. Now that she had it, she had to learn to play the guitar and sing … in a voice a few octaves higher than her usual.
“Every conversation about Joan’s voice, you hear about her vibrato, the key she sings in and the angelic quality. It was about getting those things so it was recognizable,” recalls Barbaro, a supporting actress Oscar nominee — one of the film’s eight nods, including best picture. “I leaned into getting as close to her as possible. And on the day, you put the preparation on the shelf and receive the person in front of you in a real authentic moment.”
Barbaro didn’t meet with 84-year-old Baez but did get some phone time with her and found her to be kind and forthright. “It’s about authenticity. Joan was very approachable in the research. She reveals so much about herself. I didn’t have to cut through a lot of self-congratulatory B.S. to find what makes her tick.”
Dylan was still establishing himself in the Greenwich Village folk scene when he met Baez, by then a star. “She had a very complicated relationship with fame in that it didn’t really sit right with her,” notes Barbaro. “I think it bumped against her values, and she was looking for lyrics that were saying something so she could put this platform she had into doing some good.”
Playing opposite Timothée Chalamet’s sometimes cruel Bob Dylan in the new biopic, Fanning brings heart and complexity to a performance she’s been building up to.
Dylan’s talent as a songwriter was immediately apparent to Baez, and before long they fell into each other’s arms, despite his longtime relationship with Suze Rotolo, represented in the film by fictional character Sylvie Russo (Elle Fanning). In a pivotal scene, Baez wakes up next to Dylan (Timothée Chalamet) after their first night together. She harmonizes while he sketches out a new song called “Blowin’ in the Wind.”
“There are so many components to that scene; it’s multiple pages too. We shot that for 14 hours,” Barbaro says with a sigh about filming in temperatures sometimes topping 100 degrees under the lights. It was her final scene on the film and the most intimate.
“It has to be so raw, first thing in the morning, finding your voice and finding each other’s voice. She’s seeing the words for the first time, but she’s also a talented musician and knows how to pick up the melody and harmonize and play. He’s in the corner on his bed, noodling [on] the guitar, being kind of a d—. But for me, the one thing I wanted to make sure to have was the impact of his writing on her.”
Dylan and Baez were romantically linked until his 1965 U.K. tour (which is not in “A Complete Unknown” but is immortalized in D.A. Pennebaker’s documentary “Don’t Look Back”). Accompanying him months later at the Newport Folk Festival, where he went electric (the new movie’s climax), Baez flips him the bird as he takes the stage.
“She fell in love with the poet, the person willing to say what he was willing to say. I think she fell in love with the words themselves and how he was saying things she was trying to find the words for,” says Barbaro about the doomed relationship. “She talked about how there was a mother-child dynamic between them too. And they were so young. If I try to unpack my relationships at 20 ... I can’t imagine that being inspected on a public level for decades to come.”
Originally from San Francisco, Barbaro grew up in the Bay Area suburb of Mill Valley, where she began dancing at an early age and went on to study ballet. Graduating NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts in 2010, she decided to pursue acting, finding work on such shows as Lifetime’s “UnREAL” and NBC’s “Chicago Justice,” and eventually landing the role of Lt. Natasha “Phoenix” Trace in “Top Gun: Maverick” alongside Tom Cruise.
“My experience with Timothée and Tom is that they work tirelessly at being good at what their characters are good at,” she says, comparing her two leading actors. “It’s an all-consuming profession because you have to learn skills in a matter of months as if you’ve been doing them for decades.”
Led by Timothée Chalamet and a superb cast that includes Monica Barbaro and Elle Fanning, director James Mangold’s film captures the cruel side of Bob Dylan.
A few weeks ago, Barbaro learned of a thing called an Oscar shortlist. A few days later, she learned she was on it. “I was mid-fitting for another project,” she recalls of the day of the nominations. “My publicist asked if I’d be available to talk at the time. I’m not going to change around my day and sit by my phone. I was going to play it cool. The next thing I knew, my phone was blowing up with congratulations. It’s mind-blowing. Sometimes people will say, ‘Academy Award nominee Monica Barbaro,’ and it stops me, whoa!”
Dylan and Baez sang about the issues of their time — social justice, war, racism — issues that persist today. “It was only 60 years ago. Human evolution takes time,” says Barbaro, wondering if in some ways the times, they aren’t a changin’.
“I like to be optimistic, but some days, politically speaking, my optimism is through the floor. The coolest thing about this film is getting to see audiences who lived then and [see them] feel like their time was understood.”
