Music as activism and community building runs through the Timothée Chalamet starrer A Complete Unknown in which he embodies the enigmatic Bob Dylan during the first 10 years of his skyrocketing career. From Woody Guthrie (Scoot McNairy) to Pete Seeger (Edward Norton) to Dylan, there’s a legacy of handing down storytelling through song from one troubadour to the next. Equally as important but on the periphery of Dylan’s story is the activist with the singular soprano, Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro), and another of his muses and girlfriends, artist Sylvie Russo, Elle Fanning playing a version of Dylan's girlfriend of the time, Suze Rotolo.
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“I think [Baez] deserves to have her own biopic, limited series, all the things. And I hope that in this, I hope if people don't know about Joan, I hope they see this film and gain more interest and go to learn all of what she did because only so much time to tell the stories of every other character,” Barbaro tells The Advocate. Though the documentary about Baez released in 2023, Joan Baez: I Am a Noise, dove into her music, art, history of protest, and highlighted her being open about an affair with a woman at a time when people were not out, there’s more to learn about the singer who often performed with Dylan during his early days.
“Her first protest, I think she was something like 16,” the Top Gun: Maverickstar says. “It was important for me to understand all of that about her and then just try to find the moments in which I could sort of nod to that maybe in scenes or just to where the understanding of her would be present in a scene.”
For A Complete Unknown, Chalamet and Barbaro sang and played guitar themselves, capturing the essence of the folk heroes they played. The traditional folk song “The Water Is Wide” helped Barbaro step into Baez.
“She sings in such a high beautiful register, and it really has that angelic quality. And so sometimes in warmups I would just sort of play with that on my own. It’s kind of a heartbreaking song, and I just really connected with it,” Barbaro says. “That was one of the first songs I heard of hers that entered my whole body. And I think that was kind of an entry point for me. And it was nice that it wasn't in the film because it wasn't really attached to any expectation of performance of it in the end either. I sort of had my own relationship with just that song.”
Elle Fanning as Sylvie Russo and Timothée Chalamet as Bob Dylan in 'A Complete Unknown.'Searchlight Pictures
Beyond the music, Chalamet was taken with Dylan’s often brash and cool on-cam persona in the 1960s.
“As [this] project approached me, it was these early press conferences. I think when I got the email about the project, I YouTubed Bob Dylan. The first thing that popped up was this 1965 San Francisco press conference and doing interviews like this,” Chalamet says. He shares that his earliest memories of Dylan came from a friend of his dad’s who had “these striking images of Dylan on the wall.”
“I've had my own fair share of public-facing things, and I was just so fascinated with the way Bob carried himself and how he was, in a sense, but very subtly, so subtle that the journalists couldn't even really tell at times if he was being confrontational.”
Early in the film, Dylan the wayfarer visits Guthrie in the hospital where the elder statesman of folk music was laid up with Huntington’s Disease for years. There, Chalamet’s Dylan finds Seeger, the community builder.
Norton recalls a rich history of folk music in his house growing up.
“My mother in particular was very into Joan Baez and Judy Collins and a lot of the women singers from that era. And I probably, like many, heard Pete Seeger's songs through Peter Paul and Mary first,” Norton says. “Some of their biggest hits were 'If I Had a Hammer' and 'Where Have all the Flowers Gone,' which Pete Seeger wrote.”
Regarding his character, who first introducers Dylan to the folk clubs of Greenwich Village, Norton says, “I think he first and foremost viewed music as a way to convene people and to uplift them and to communicate, to communicate the stories of working people, which is where his roots were in the socialist labor movement in the thirties.”
“And then, on through the Civil Rights Movement and the anti-war movement and the environmental movement, he brought people together around ideas,” Norton says. “I view him as someone who was a radical, not necessarily in his artistic innovation, but more in the idea of how powerfully he thought you could bind people together in common cause through music.”
Timothée Chalamet as Bob Dylan and Monica Barbaro as Joan Baez in 'A Complete Unknown.'Searchlight Pictures
Community based around music is how Dylan and Fanning’s Russo meet — at an all-day hootenanny in a church. A young woman with modern ideas and an accomplished visual artist in her own right, Russo is influential in young Dylan’s life even if she sidelines her own accomplishments for a time.
“She is so politically active and very grounded and strong, and I wanted to make sure that her inner life because she's this kind of pillar of strength for Bob. He keeps returning back to her. But just showing someone who's in a relationship with someone who they're not on the same page,” Fanning says. “He's going off into the stratosphere and she is kind of not necessarily being left behind, but she's wanting something from him that she knows she can't have because, and she doesn't necessarily. It's like she wants it, but then she also knows that he's a genius and this artist and she wants him to be able to go and soar."
A Complete Unknown is in theaters.
Elle Fanning as Sylvie Russo and Timothée Chalamet as Bob Dylan in 'A Complete Unknown.'Searchlight Pictures
Timothée Chalamet as Bob Dylan and Monica Barbaro as Joan Baez in 'A Complete Unknown.'Searchlight Pictures 
