Timothée Chalamet as Bob Dylan may be the “Complete Unknown” at the center of James Mangold’s ’60s folk music biopic, but Dylan’s musical peers Joan Baez and Johnny Cash also get a chance to shine. They’re played by Monica Barbaro (now a SAG nominee for her performance) and Boyd Holbrook with a loose reverence for the actual people, with performances that, instead of imitation, take cues from the music itself. They’re the moths to Dylan’s flame, but they follow their own star in this movie.
“James Mangold is a brilliant director, and he positioned this so beautifully so that you have multiple perspectives of the people who surrounded Bob and not even so much that it plays in the sense of power dynamics, but just that you have really independent, identifiable people and how they receive Bob and the impact that he has on them plays out in this movie in a really compelling way,” Barbaro told IndieWire.
Baez marks Barbaro’s most potent big-screen role to date after other supporting turns in “Top Gun: Maverick,” where she was the only female naval pilot among a crew of bros, and Ricky D’Ambrose’s Spirit Award-winning family drama “The Cathedral.”
In “A Complete Unknown,” she sings and plays guitar as folk songstress Baez, who has a turbulent affair with Dylan, one which certainly contributes to the onstage vibes of their shared performances in Greenwich Village and at the Newport Folk Festival — where Mangold and co-writer Jay Cocks bend history a bit to have them sing the torching breakup ballad “It Ain’t Me Babe” together onstage. That didn’t happen in reality, but it’s again part of the mood of a movie that’s about sounds and impressions rather than a recreation of life.
“[Joan] was at the height of her career when she met Bob in reality and in this film. She was looking for new music, and he was writing everything she was trying to say and couldn’t find the words to say,” she said. “So they have this beautiful collision of spirits, but she held her own, and she remained a solo performer as much as she continued to collaborate with him throughout decades. She’s Joan, and she had her own identity as a musician. … Even in a symbolic, visual sense, a lot of times when Joan and Bob would play together, in footage of them, Bob is playing the guitar and Joan doesn’t have her guitar. I, being a bit of a slave to the research, would say to Jim, ‘Oh, she didn’t have a guitar when they sang at this festival together.’ What do you do with two guitars? He loved the imagery of Joan with the guitar. He felt like she maintained her independence and stood beautifully on her own. I’ve said autonomy like 17 times, but that was the name of the game for me.”
Barbaro did reach out to Baez but doesn’t know if she’s seen the film or not or even plans to. Or would want to. (Bob Dylan gave Chalamet his imprimatur of approval without explicitly saying he had seen or would see the movie.)
“I wasn’t sure if I should reach out personally,” said Barbaro, who ultimately spoke to the folk icon. “I sort of went behind [the production’s] back and asked my agents … she agreed to it, we picked a time. It was professionally done just sort of sneakily so. … When we spoke on the phone, I was saying something to the effect of deferring to her on something. She was like, ‘I’m just in the backyard, sitting outside, watching the birds.’ I was like, yeah, you’re not wrapped up in what we say about you. This doesn’t define you in any way.”
Barbaro is a trained dancer, so how did that come into play in terms of playing the singer? “Certainly not in this time period of her life performing. She was quite still, and I recognized that immediately, like, ‘Oh, OK, I can’t rely on the dance thing.’” For the singing, though, she worked with Eric Vetro, vocal coach to the stars including Austin Butler for “Elvis.”
“If you ask me, I didn’t have a voice before this,” Barbaro said. “I sang for this audition. I had to sing for the ‘Top Gun’ audition! I hadn’t really taken on a lot of training. You do vocal training as an actor, but not to the degree I did for this, but it took a lot. I met with Eric two, three times a week for the entirety of this process aside from the strike … in that time, I just sang alone and used the recordings he had created for me. He’s the guy. He knows how to do this. We talked in the beginning about getting her iconic vocal qualities … the tight vibrato and the pitch. I couldn’t sing in that key when I first auditioned. It was about trying to nail those elements of her voice and get that initial believability that this is Joan up there. Replicating her voice is impossible.”
In the film, Kentucky-hailing Boyd Holbrook offers a short but memorable presence as Johnny Cash, one of Dylan’s idols before the folk singer superseded even the Nashville “I Walk the Line” singer. Though you can’t exactly say Holbrook’s is a sharp one, as his Cash is fully dulled-out on drugs or drink in his handful of standout scenes.
“How do you play drunk, man? That has been a question for 15 years,” he told IndieWire. “Since I started studying acting. That’s been one big conversation — accents, impediments, really. Dialects, drunk, you start cracking that stuff. I started thinking about it and have done it bad and hopefully got it wrong a couple times. … The great thing about acting is that I catch myself daydreaming about scenes. I’ll be doing the dishes or working on a deck or something like that, and you’re lost in thought, and then that’s it. Then, you have to go rehearse it. There’s a line in [the movie], ‘I saw the ocean,’ I knew exactly how fucked-up this guy is. To choose that to talk about how meaningful that was, or what an event it was for him.”
No, you’re not sober if you’re saying that to Bob Dylan, and on that time of day. It takes you a minute to realize this is Boyd Holbrook on the screen. There’s a prosthetic nose, there’s eyebrows, there’s hair, a whole look meant to make him convincingly as Johnny Cash as possible. Holbrook worked with a makeup artist named Stacey Panepinto.
“At the beginning, I told Jim [Mangold], I don’t look like Johnny Cash. He said very straightforward, ‘Nobody looks like anybody.’ And that’s true once you start breaking down all of us, but you start adding things and making an impression of a person that gives an essence of that,” the actor said. “There’s a real weaving and bobbing until you kind of have got the voice down, listened to his cadence and his dialect so much that I create my own version of that, and I have this impression of the physicality, without it being like, ‘Wait a second, what’s going on there?’ Because then it’s like a ventriloquist, really.”
Holbrook is indeed weaving and bobbing out of the movie, sauntering drunkenly into and out of scenes. Because of “A Complete Unknown,” Holbrook now said he will be “forever able to play music,” as he sharpened his guitar and singing skills after pretending to be a better musician than he actually is for the audition. “I couldn’t do that at the beginning of this project. I can count and stay in time now. … I had a couple months of buffer time before I started having to send those [audition] tapes in,” he said.
Cash has a number of living relatives, but Holbrook didn’t go after a blessing from any of them to create his performance. “The script is the bible, and at this point, I know what I need to do, and I could’ve gotten somebody’s blessing, I guess, but it’s still not John’s blessing. I hope they feel we’ve celebrated their loved one’s life, and that I did justice to these legends and these icons without cementing their legacy — I don’t ever want to tarnish anything. It was my goal from the beginning to celebrate them. Hopefully they feel that way.”
“A Complete Unknown” is now in theaters.
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