A Complete Unknown is filled with outstanding performances, but none more powerful than Monica Barbaro’s portrayal of music icon Joan Baez. The film centers around Bob Dylan, played by Timothée Chalamet, and his journey and rise to stardom, but Barbaro’s performance ties it all together. She takes the audience inside Dylan’s emotional roller coaster — the highs of emotional creativity and lyrical storytelling and the lows of ambition and frustration.
FlickSided had the opportunity to speak with Barbaro about her performance, working with Timothée Chalamet and Edward Norton and building up on-screen emotion.
What attracted Joan Baez and Bob Dylan together?
Barbaro: Well, Joan, at the beginning of this film, was kind of on top of the world. Musically, she had sort of re-awoken an interest in folk, because she was a young, beautiful, talented musician singing old songs in a new way. But she was, I think, having a bit of a resistance to her relationship with fame and what all that meant.
She wanted to use her platform. She was this budding activist. I think she wanted to use what she had, the attention that was on her, to say something greater. And I think when she met Bob, he's this vagabond, kind of a mess of a boy and yet he has these absolutely brilliant ways of expressing what I think she was trying to say. So I think she was just really drawn to that element of him. I mean, of course, he was a charismatic performer, but, even that, I think, developed as he went along. When she met him, I think she really just fell in love with what he was saying with his lyrics and his poetry.
What kind of story did you want to tell with Joan?
Barbaro: I think the interesting thing about Joan is that she is an observer. The way she writes about herself is just very open and honest. And she is really perceptive. She drew a lot, which I think you draw, you look at the world differently. And so I did some of that very privately on the side, and will not be sharing those sketches! But I think I just tried to sort of embody what I understood about her and the way she processed the world. And the beauty of working with someone like Jim (James Mangold) as a director is that he chooses his moments of close ups, and in the edit he knows how to filter through for the best of those moments, the best of those observational moments, and what they sort of do for the story.
Embodying Joan Baez
Barbaro: It was important to all of us who were representing musicians in this film to not be doing any level of mimicry. I mean, that can be maybe a part of the process to kind of find a way in and to understand them. But ultimately, when you show up, you want to let that go and embrace their essence. And I feel everyone did that. I feel like there's a bit of a push and pull, and maybe one take felt more mimicked than another. But I think at the end of the day, you set all that work aside and just show up presently with your scene partner, and Timothée and Ed and Boyd, they were all just such magnificent scene partners. Elle too, but we didn't have scenes together!
Watch A Complete Unknown in theaters this Christmas.