1 of 5
Develop
Think about the extraordinary strain Monica Barbaro should have been underneath as she ready for her position as people music icon Joan Baez within the Oscar-nominated Bob Dylan biopic “A Complete Unknown.”When she received the half in 2023, the 34-year-old actor had by no means been a singer, didn’t know the best way to play the guitar and had just a few months to discover ways to do each.
On prime of that, she was intent on portraying a plausible model of the younger Joan Baez with out it being an inexpensive impression or a caricature. And he or she knew that the 84-year-old singer and social justice activist would undoubtedly see the film and choose her efficiency.
Extremely, she completed what at first would appear unattainable, and he or she’s executed it to common acclaim. Barbaro, who grew up in Mill Valley and graduated from Tamalpais Excessive Faculty in 2007, has gotten an Academy Award nomination for greatest supporting actress for her work within the movie. Timothée Chalamet, who performs Dylan, is up for greatest actor, and “A Complete Unknown” is within the operating for greatest image.
Baez’s approval
For Barbaro, maybe extra importantly than all of the accolades is the approval of Baez, who loved the film and was delighted with Barbaro’s depiction of her.
“I loved what she did in the film,” mentioned Baez from her house 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 film follows 19-year-old Dylan’s arrival amid New York Metropolis’s burgeoning Greenwich Village people scene in 1961, his tumultuous love affair with Baez, who was already a star, and his rise over the following 4 years from acoustic guitar-strumming songwriting genius to a plugged-in rock ‘n’ curler who goes electrical on the 1965 Newport Folks Competition, inflicting a lot pearl clutching among the many likes of Pete Seeger (performed authentically by Edward Norton) and different people purists whereas on the similar time altering the course of fashionable music.
Coming off a supporting position within the blockbuster Tom Cruise motion movie “Top Gun: Maverick,” Barbaro initially had 5 months earlier than the beginning of filming for “A Complete Unknown.” She instantly dug into intensive analysis on her character, who has written a few memoirs and is the topic of a latest documentary, “Joan Baez: I Am a Noise.” On the similar time, she began working with a vocal coach and a guitar trainer till a curveball received thrown into the manufacturing within the type of the Hollywood actors and writers strike, which gave her one other 4 months to follow, however on her personal, with out skilled assist.
“I wasn’t allowed to train with coaches at that time,” mentioned Barbaro, talking from a resort room in Paris whereas on a European press junket to advertise the film. “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 many hardest gaps to bridge was approximating one of many nice soprano voices in fashionable music historical past. Rising up in Marin, Barbaro was a severe ballet pupil who went on to get a level in dance from New York College’s Tisch Faculty of the Arts. Till this film, singing was the farthest factor from her thoughts. However you’d by no means know that after listening to her sing within the movie, together with a beautiful solo rendition of “House of the Rising Sun,” accompanying herself on guitar.
“I wasn’t a singer. I’m not a singer,” she mentioned. “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.”
After which there was studying to play guitar like Baez, to not point out singing and taking part in on the similar time.
“I didn’t play guitar at all,” she mentioned. “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.”
Chatting with her idol
Baez let or not it’s identified that she would make herself out there to any of the actors who needed to talk to her. Norton took her up on it, asking her about Seeger, the honest however typically inflexible people traditionalist he performs within the movie. However Barbaro was hesitant at first, apprehensive about speaking to this revered determine she had come to idolize.
“At that point I had her pretty high on a pedestal,” she mentioned. “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.”
Ultimately, although, one thing virtually mystical helped her overcome her fears.
“I know it’s strange, but I kept dreaming about her, about meeting her,” she mentioned. “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 factor, Baez eased her worries and gave her the boldness and permission she wanted to drag off the position.
“I felt emotional hearing her voice on the phone because I had been studying her voice in her 20s so intensely,” she mentioned. “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 vacations, Barbaro, who lives in Los Angeles (her house was not affected by the fires), returned to Marin to go to together with her mom, who nonetheless lives in Mill Valley. When “A Complete Unknown” was launched on Christmas Day, that they had deliberate to see it collectively near house. To their shock, the film was so extremely anticipated that each theater exhibiting it in Marin was offered out. The one place they might get tickets was on the Metreon in San Francisco.
Like Baez, Barbaro’s mom is half Mexican. She was born in 1948, placing her within the vanguard of the newborn boomers who fondly bear in mind the people 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,” mentioned Barbaro of her mother. “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 beloved the music
Baez noticed the film at a theater close to the place she lives 11 days after it was launched. Like so many film-goers and reviewers, it impressed her that the entire musical numbers within the film had been executed reside, with the actors singing and taking part in their devices.
“I thought the music was fantastic,” she mentioned. “I may be blocking my feelings, but it’s an amusing movie. It was fun.”
Figuring out Joan as a pal, I had my doubts that any actor might painting her singular presence as a people phenomenon who had been on the quilt of Time journal when she was simply 21. However Barbaro gained me over. I notably loved the scene the place she flips Dylan off as he joins her on stage to sing “It Ain’t Me Babe,” exhibiting their difficult love-hate relationship.
“I love that scene,” Barbaro mentioned. “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 environment of the interval, director James Mangold references the strain within the nation over the specter of nuclear warfare through the Cuban Missile Disaster in 1962.
Within the movie, the love affair between Dylan and Baez smolders and ignites when she hears him singing the protest anthem “Masters of War” on the Gaslight membership in Greenwich Village. After Dylan comes off stage, he and Baez embrace in a passionate makeout session and find yourself spending the night time collectively.
Discussing the scene in a video interview selling the film, Mangold says stuff like that occurs in actual life. Baez has no downside with it, regardless that the scene is pure fiction.
“It was pleasantly brief,” mentioned Baez with amusing, mentioning her college-age granddaughter’s cringey response 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 Motion was heating up, culminating within the Civil Rights Act of 1964. There’s a temporary scene within the film when Dylan listens to a Black speaker at a small road rally. However, in 1963, he and Baez sang for 250,000 folks on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial through the March on Washington, the place Martin Luther King Jr. made his famed “I Have a Dream” speech. That historic second will not be within the film, regardless that Dylan’s reluctance to turn out to be an activist was a supply of battle between the 2 singers, who would finally break up.
“I wanted him to be in the marches and on the steps and whatever,” Baez mentioned. “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, regardless that the younger people savant she remembers was lots scruffier than the one she noticed on the massive display. Scruffy or not, his charisma was plain, a truism that shines by means of in “A Complete Unknown.”
“I have to come back to that’s how it was,” she mentioned. “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 dedicated to taking pictures a brand new film in London, however she hopes to have the ability to get away for the Joan Baez tribute live performance on the Masonic in San Francisco on Feb. 8. It could be an opportunity to see and meet her idol nose to nose for the primary time.
“I’m doing everything I can to try and make it back to go and see her,” she mentioned. “Whether I meet her or not, it would be so cool just to be there.”
Contact Paul Liberatore at p.liberatore@comcast.internet
