Imagine the intense pressure Monica Barbaro must have been under as she prepared for her role as folk music icon Joan Baez in the Oscar-nominated Bob Dylan biopic “A Complete Unknown.”When she got the part in 2023, the 34-year-old actor had never been a singer, didn’t know how to play the guitar and had only a few months to learn how to do both.
On top of that, she was intent on portraying a believable version of the young Joan Baez without it being a cheap impression or a caricature. And she knew that the 84-year-old singer and social justice activist would undoubtedly see the movie and judge her performance.
Incredibly, she accomplished what at first would seem impossible, and she’s done it to universal acclaim. Barbaro, who grew up in Mill Valley and graduated from Tamalpais High School in 2007, has gotten an Academy Award nomination for best supporting actress for her work in the film. Timothée Chalamet, who plays Dylan, is up for best actor, and “A Complete Unknown” is in the running for best picture.
Baez’s approval
For Barbaro, perhaps more importantly than all the accolades is the approval of Baez, who enjoyed the movie and was delighted with Barbaro’s depiction of her.
“I loved what she did in the film,” said Baez from her home in Woodside. “If I didn’t think she was good at it, I probably wouldn’t have enjoyed it in general. But she looked enough like me and she had my gestures down. You could tell who it was. She worked so hard. Kudos to her for taking the role on.”
The movie follows 19-year-old Dylan’s arrival amid New York City’s burgeoning Greenwich Village folk scene in 1961, his tumultuous love affair with Baez, who was already a star, and his rise over the next four years from acoustic guitar-strumming songwriting genius to a plugged-in rock ‘n’ roller who goes electric at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, causing much pearl clutching among the likes of Pete Seeger (played authentically by Edward Norton) and other folk purists while at the same time changing the course of popular music.
Coming off a supporting role in the blockbuster Tom Cruise action film “Top Gun: Maverick,” Barbaro initially had five months before the start of filming for “A Complete Unknown.” She immediately dug into extensive research on her character, who has written a couple of memoirs and is the subject of a recent documentary, “Joan Baez: I Am a Noise.” At the same time, she started working with a vocal coach and a guitar teacher until a curveball got thrown into the production in the form of the Hollywood actors and writers strike, which gave her another four months to practice, but on her own, without professional help.
“I wasn’t allowed to train with coaches at that time,” said Barbaro, speaking from a hotel room in Paris while on a European press junket to promote the movie. “They had pretty strict rules around the strike. But I took it upon myself to bridge the gap.”
A dancer not a singer
One of the hardest gaps to bridge was approximating one of the great soprano voices in popular music history. Growing up in Marin, Barbaro was a serious ballet student who went on to get a degree in dance from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. Until this movie, singing was the farthest thing from her mind. But you’d never know that after hearing her sing in the film, including a lovely solo rendition of “House of the Rising Sun,” accompanying herself on guitar.
“I wasn’t a singer. I’m not a singer,” she said. “I had to just acknowledge that it’s absolutely impossible to perfect Joan’s voice, or to sound like her. Lots of women in the folk scene tried to do just that, to sound like Joan, but it’s really impossible. Her voice is so unique.”
And then there was learning to play guitar like Baez, not to mention singing and playing at the same time.
“I didn’t play guitar at all,” she said. “Joan’s fingerpicking style is so intricate, so specific, and I had no experience at that. I would have a metronome at a snail’s pace to even get two fingers to pluck strings at the same time. A lot of our background artists were musicians and actors in their own right, and, once I could put all those things together, singing in front of those people was a terrifying, intimate, vulnerable experience. Not only doing it as Joan but doing it at all. The imposter syndrome was pretty rampant. It was incredibly challenging.”
Speaking to her idol
Baez let it be known that she would make herself available to any of the actors who wanted to speak to her. Norton took her up on it, asking her about Seeger, the sincere but often rigid folk traditionalist he plays in the film. But Barbaro was hesitant at first, apprehensive about talking to this revered figure she had come to idolize.
“At that point I had her pretty high on a pedestal,” she said. “If I were to interview her and not be playing her in a movie, then I would be incredibly nervous and intimidated to, like, speak to her and not say something stupid. But with the added pressure of embodying her in this film, I really wanted to do her justice, but I wasn’t sure if I was going to speak to her in part because of the intimidation factor.”
Eventually, though, something almost mystical helped her overcome her fears.
“I know it’s strange, but I kept dreaming about her, about meeting her,” she said. “I knew she had spoken to Ed Norton and that she had given this film her arrangements of her songs. She had proven to be very helpful to the production, and I just felt something in my subconscious kept pushing me to talk to her. And I’m so glad I did.”
For one thing, Baez eased her worries and gave her the confidence and permission she needed to pull off the role.
“I felt emotional hearing her voice on the phone because I had been studying her voice in her 20s so intensely,” she said. “And I felt like I had so much respect for her. But she was like, ‘Oh, I’m just in my garden listening to the birds.’ And I was like, oh, yeah, you don’t live or die by what we say about you in this movie. She’s lived her life. And I can’t imagine how surreal it would be to know that someone is sort of dressing up and playing you in a movie. But she really took it in stride. She wasn’t trying to dictate in any way my response to her. She was like, ‘I’m here, I’m open and available for any question you have.’ I was really appreciative that she was so generous with me.”
‘The Times They Are A-Changin’
Over the holidays, Barbaro, who lives in Los Angeles (her home was not affected by the fires), returned to Marin to visit with her mother, who still lives in Mill Valley. When “A Complete Unknown” was released on Christmas Day, they had planned to see it together close to home. To their surprise, the movie was so highly anticipated that every theater showing it in Marin was sold out. The only place they could get tickets was at the Metreon in San Francisco.
Like Baez, Barbaro’s mother is half Mexican. She was born in 1948, putting her in the vanguard of the baby boomers who fondly remember the folk music revival of the ‘60s that was spearheaded by Dylan and Baez. She was particularly touched by an intimate scene in which her daughter and Chalamet, as Dylan and Baez, sing “The Times They Are A-Changin.’”
“It was really cool to be able to take her to this movie because I felt like it was one that was really close to her,” said Barbaro of her mom. “She was crying through ‘The Times They Are A-Changin’ because yeah, the times they must change, they must constantly change. After the movie, my friend’s dad comes around the corner of the theater and he’s like, ‘I love the ’60s. It should have never changed. It was the best time in music history.’ It was so cool to see how completely different people’s responses are to the exact same film.”
Baez loved the music
Baez saw the movie at a theater near where she lives 11 days after it was released. Like so many film-goers and reviewers, it impressed her that all of the musical numbers in the movie were done live, with the actors singing and playing their instruments.
“I thought the music was fantastic,” she said. “I may be blocking my feelings, but it’s an amusing movie. It was fun.”
Knowing Joan as a friend, I had my doubts that any actor could portray her singular presence as a folk phenomenon who had been on the cover of Time magazine when she was just 21. But Barbaro won me over. I particularly enjoyed the scene where she flips Dylan off as he joins her on stage to sing “It Ain’t Me Babe,” showing their complicated love-hate relationship.
“I love that scene,” Barbaro said. “Before that it wasn’t really revealed that she was like that. She had this faintly angelic imagery all around her, but she was also a very real kind of person who would say f— you it she needed to.”
Love scene
In a nod to the ominous political atmosphere of the period, director James Mangold references the tension in the country over the threat of nuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962.
In the film, the love affair between Dylan and Baez smolders and ignites when she hears him singing the protest anthem “Masters of War” at the Gaslight club in Greenwich Village. After Dylan comes off stage, he and Baez embrace in a passionate makeout session and end up spending the night together.
Discussing the scene in a video interview promoting the movie, Mangold says stuff like that happens in real life. Baez has no problem with it, even though the scene is pure fiction.
“It was pleasantly brief,” said Baez with a laugh, mentioning her college-age granddaughter’s cringey reaction to it. “She said, ‘I don’t want to see my grandmother making out in a film.’”
‘Those songs were enough’
The early ’60s was a time when the Civil Rights Movement was heating up, culminating in the Civil Rights Act of 1964. There is a brief scene in the movie when Dylan listens to a Black speaker at a small street rally. But, in 1963, he and Baez sang for 250,000 people on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial during the March on Washington, where Martin Luther King Jr. made his famed “I Have a Dream” speech. That historic moment is not in the movie, even though Dylan’s reluctance to become an activist was a source of conflict between the two singers, who would eventually break up.
“I wanted him to be in the marches and on the steps and whatever,” Baez said. “He didn’t want to and I couldn’t let that go. It was unfair of me to expect more of him because he was such an important force and those songs were so unbelievable. It took me the next 50 years to realize those songs were enough.”
Baez praises Chalamet’s portrayal of her onetime lover, even though the young folk savant she remembers was a lot scruffier than the one she saw on the big screen. Scruffy or not, his charisma was undeniable, a truism that shines through in “A Complete Unknown.”
“I have to come back to that’s how it was,” she said. “When he walked into the room, he took up all the oxygen. And so my part was always diminished in his presence. And in that sense the film is accurate.”
Barbaro has committed to shooting a new movie in London, but she hopes to be able to get away for the Joan Baez tribute concert at the Masonic in San Francisco on Feb. 8. It would be a chance to see and meet her idol face to face for the first time.
“I’m doing everything I can to try and make it back to go and see her,” she said. “Whether I meet her or not, it would be so cool just to be there.”
Contact Paul Liberatore at p.liberatore@comcast.net