How to Get the Joan Baez Sound? Sleep with Your Guitar
The PicturesPlaying Joan Baez to Timothée Chalamet’s Dylan in “A Complete Unknown,” Monica Barbaro took up sketching and picking.By Michael SchulmanJanuary 6, 2025Illustration by João FazendaAt the stroke of noon one frigid weekday, the actress Monica Barbaro peered through the door to Chelsea Guitars, the hole-in-the-wall vintage-guitar shop on the ground floor of the Chelsea Hotel. No one. “I kept coming here on Sundays, and it’s not open on Sundays,” she said, referring to her time shooting the Bob Dylan bio-pic “A Complete Unknown,” in which she plays Joan Baez, opposite Timothée Chalamet. She asked a hotel doorman if the place ever opens, and he said that it’s sometimes more of a “soft open.” “A creative open,” she countered, and waited in the lobby.Barbaro, a dark-eyed thirty-five-year-old, wore a blue peacoat and jeans. The hotel, where Dylan lived in the early sixties, is also where she spent her first day of shooting, for a scene in which Baez runs outside to hail a taxi during the Cuban missile crisis. This attempted escape was somewhat out of character, she had worried, since at seventeen Baez had protested an atomic-bomb drill for giving a false sense of safety, but the director, James Mangold, assured her, “When the shit really hits the fan, you would want to be with your family.”Barbaro, who trained as a ballerina, got the role after playing a fighter pilot in “Top Gun: Maverick,” and she threw herself into Baez research. “I was listening to the music that she listened to, like Odetta, and Harry Belafonte,” she said. Barbaro had no guitar experience, but the actors’ strike meant that she had longer to practice her fingerpicking, and she studied Baez’s high, ringing vibrato.By the time Dylan arrived on the New York music scene, a complete unknown, Baez was a known. In 1962, she was on the cover of Time, the young face of the folk-music revival. “Her relationship with fame was a deeply conflicted one,” Barbaro said.Her relationship with Dylan was conflicted, too. They met at Gerde’s Folk City, in Greenwich Village, in 1961, and struck up a fraught musical romance. “In the film, he’s very interesting to her, because she’s receiving all kinds of praise, and he’s willing to boldly and kind of rudely cut her down to size,” Barbaro said. “He’s also supremely talented, and she sees that immediately.” Baez recorded Dylan’s songs and brought him onstage at her shows. Within four years, Dylan eclipsed her in fame, went electric, and broke her heart.By half past twelve, the guitar shop was open. “Do you have any Martins, by chance?” Barbaro asked the scruffy guy behind the counter, who introduced himself as Coby.“Sure do,” he said. “I got a 1949 D-28, at seventeen thousand five hundred bucks.” He took it down for her and asked, “Do you play?”“Now I do.” She whispered, “I shouldn’t admit this publicly, but I really want to get an electric guitar. I’ve been carrying these finger picks that I used for the movie in my pocket ever since we filmed. It’s like a totem to prove that it happened.” In the film, she plays a 1929 Martin 0-45. “Ed Norton”—who portrays Pete Seeger—“kept stealing it from me. He was telling me stories about how to keep props. I was, like, ‘Ed, I’m not stealing this guitar!’ ” She played a few bars of Dylan’s “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right,” which Baez recorded live in 1963, and which Barbaro and Chalamet both sing in the movie.“It’s a very special song,” Coby said.“It is,” Barbaro agreed. “ ‘Farewell, Angelina,’ too, just crushes me.” She tried out a jauntier tune, “Mama, You Been on My Mind.” “Joan sings ‘Daddy, you been on my mind,’ and it throws Dylan off. You can hear it in a recording. I love it.”She thanked Coby and went back to the hotel lobby. While Barbaro was working on “A Complete Unknown,” Baez, at eighty-two, released a book of drawings, rendered upside-down, some with her nondominant hand. Barbaro took up drawing, too; she made a picture of Chalamet and Mangold watching a playback. “You see the world differently when you draw,” Barbaro said, then took out a pad and sketched a pair of hotel guests with their suitcases.During filming, she had arranged a phone call with Baez. When they were connected, Barbaro nervously gushed that Baez deserved her own movie. Baez, as if to wave away her concern, said, “I’m just in the garden, watching the birds!” Barbaro had questions: how Baez had learned guitar, how she came up with her arrangement for “House of the Rising Sun.” “She said, ‘Sometimes I would fall asleep with my guitar in my bed and wake up in the morning and keep playing.’ And I was, like, ‘Oh, my God, I’ve done that!’ ” Afterward, Baez texted her a drawing of some lavender cufflinks she had given Dylan. Barbaro had been having dreams about Baez, and the phone call settled them. “In one, we were in a vintage convertible, driving around the highway,” Barbaro recalled. “She’s laughing, and I’m, like, This is great! My subconscious was definitely trying to tell me that ever
At the stroke of noon one frigid weekday, the actress Monica Barbaro peered through the door to Chelsea Guitars, the hole-in-the-wall vintage-guitar shop on the ground floor of the Chelsea Hotel. No one. “I kept coming here on Sundays, and it’s not open on Sundays,” she said, referring to her time shooting the Bob Dylan bio-pic “A Complete Unknown,” in which she plays Joan Baez, opposite Timothée Chalamet. She asked a hotel doorman if the place ever opens, and he said that it’s sometimes more of a “soft open.” “A creative open,” she countered, and waited in the lobby.
Barbaro, a dark-eyed thirty-five-year-old, wore a blue peacoat and jeans. The hotel, where Dylan lived in the early sixties, is also where she spent her first day of shooting, for a scene in which Baez runs outside to hail a taxi during the Cuban missile crisis. This attempted escape was somewhat out of character, she had worried, since at seventeen Baez had protested an atomic-bomb drill for giving a false sense of safety, but the director, James Mangold, assured her, “When the shit really hits the fan, you would want to be with your family.”
Barbaro, who trained as a ballerina, got the role after playing a fighter pilot in “Top Gun: Maverick,” and she threw herself into Baez research. “I was listening to the music that she listened to, like Odetta, and Harry Belafonte,” she said. Barbaro had no guitar experience, but the actors’ strike meant that she had longer to practice her fingerpicking, and she studied Baez’s high, ringing vibrato.
By the time Dylan arrived on the New York music scene, a complete unknown, Baez was a known. In 1962, she was on the cover of Time, the young face of the folk-music revival. “Her relationship with fame was a deeply conflicted one,” Barbaro said.
Her relationship with Dylan was conflicted, too. They met at Gerde’s Folk City, in Greenwich Village, in 1961, and struck up a fraught musical romance. “In the film, he’s very interesting to her, because she’s receiving all kinds of praise, and he’s willing to boldly and kind of rudely cut her down to size,” Barbaro said. “He’s also supremely talented, and she sees that immediately.” Baez recorded Dylan’s songs and brought him onstage at her shows. Within four years, Dylan eclipsed her in fame, went electric, and broke her heart.
By half past twelve, the guitar shop was open. “Do you have any Martins, by chance?” Barbaro asked the scruffy guy behind the counter, who introduced himself as Coby.
“Sure do,” he said. “I got a 1949 D-28, at seventeen thousand five hundred bucks.” He took it down for her and asked, “Do you play?”
“Now I do.” She whispered, “I shouldn’t admit this publicly, but I really want to get an electric guitar. I’ve been carrying these finger picks that I used for the movie in my pocket ever since we filmed. It’s like a totem to prove that it happened.” In the film, she plays a 1929 Martin 0-45. “Ed Norton”—who portrays Pete Seeger—“kept stealing it from me. He was telling me stories about how to keep props. I was, like, ‘Ed, I’m not stealing this guitar!’ ” She played a few bars of Dylan’s “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right,” which Baez recorded live in 1963, and which Barbaro and Chalamet both sing in the movie.
“It’s a very special song,” Coby said.
“It is,” Barbaro agreed. “ ‘Farewell, Angelina,’ too, just crushes me.” She tried out a jauntier tune, “Mama, You Been on My Mind.” “Joan sings ‘Daddy, you been on my mind,’ and it throws Dylan off. You can hear it in a recording. I love it.”
She thanked Coby and went back to the hotel lobby. While Barbaro was working on “A Complete Unknown,” Baez, at eighty-two, released a book of drawings, rendered upside-down, some with her nondominant hand. Barbaro took up drawing, too; she made a picture of Chalamet and Mangold watching a playback. “You see the world differently when you draw,” Barbaro said, then took out a pad and sketched a pair of hotel guests with their suitcases.
During filming, she had arranged a phone call with Baez. When they were connected, Barbaro nervously gushed that Baez deserved her own movie. Baez, as if to wave away her concern, said, “I’m just in the garden, watching the birds!” Barbaro had questions: how Baez had learned guitar, how she came up with her arrangement for “House of the Rising Sun.” “She said, ‘Sometimes I would fall asleep with my guitar in my bed and wake up in the morning and keep playing.’ And I was, like, ‘Oh, my God, I’ve done that!’ ” Afterward, Baez texted her a drawing of some lavender cufflinks she had given Dylan. Barbaro had been having dreams about Baez, and the phone call settled them. “In one, we were in a vintage convertible, driving around the highway,” Barbaro recalled. “She’s laughing, and I’m, like, This is great! My subconscious was definitely trying to tell me that everything is going to be O.K.” ♦
