When it comes to the world of Bob Dylan, I am incredibly biased. Like other folksy young women on the internet, my interest in the Dylan and Joan Baez love affair borders on obsession. I think about them at least once a day. A photo of them performing at the 1963 March on Washington hangs above my dorm bed. So naturally, going into a Dylan biopic, I was deeply invested in the portrayal of their relationship and whether or not Baez would receive a just characterization. I feared the worst: that “A Complete Unknown” would do to Baez what “Elvis” did to Priscilla Presley. And while it wasn’t that bad, it fell short of exploring the full depth of Baez’s character as well as the story of her relationship with Dylan.
For the uninitiated, Baez was a popular performer who had already been dubbed the “Queen of Folk” in the early 1960s, before Dylan even debuted on the scene. The pair met in 1961, and Baez’s early collaborations with Dylan played a crucial role in catapulting him to fame. In 1965, during a tumultuous joint tour of the United Kingdom, the couple separated. Baez would later recount in her memoirs that Dylan refused to let her perform with him on stage as planned, and she went home early.
I was excited when I found out that Baez would feature prominently in “A Complete Unknown,” portrayed by actress Monica Barbero. I thought that with her inclusion, this film could be a chance to set the record straight on their relationship and memorialize one of the most beautifully tortured romances in music history. This is not what “A Complete Unknown” does.
In the film Baez serves two main narrative purposes: 1) to elevate Dylan to fame, which is historically accurate, and 2) act as the wedge that separates the film’s primary love interest Sylvie Russo (pseudonym for Suze Rotolo) from Dylan. While she likely contributed to the disintegration of Russo and Dylan’s relationship, to reduce Baez to “the other woman” is insulting and minimizes the impact of her relationship with Dylan.
Baez was not only a folk singer, but an activist in the Civil Rights Movement as well. She often encouraged Dylan to join her for protests, hence their appearance at the March on Washington. Granted, Dylan was never incredibly political, but these high-profile appearances combined with his protest songs largely facilitated his rise to fame. This is crucial context for the third act of “A Complete Unknown,” when Dylan makes his controversial shift to electric music at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, but it’s entirely missing from the actual film.
Dylan’s transition from acoustic to electric music occurred as he began writing fewer and fewer of the “protest songs,” which fans had come to expect from him. Many perceived Dylan to be abandoning folk music, the language of protest, in exchange for the more commercially viable rock-and-roll. This decision is the climax of the film. Unfortunately, the significance of this decision is lost on a viewership who haven’t been able to properly follow the evolution of Dylan’s songwriting and his disillusionment with the persona of “civil rights icon.” The minimization of Baez is partially to blame.
To be clear, I don’t think that director James Mangold has some kind of vendetta against Baez. I think a more accurate statement would be that every character in “A Complete Unknown” is confined by the limits of the biopic genre, and Mangold does relatively little to rescue the film from its worst impulses. I like to call it “biopic syndrome”: in place of a cohesive narrative, a dizzying number of scenes are stitched together in a montage of events that decorate Dylan’s rise to fame. This style of filmmaking is endemic to the genre, and it’s the source of many viewer complaints over the years who regard biopics as messy, disconnected and worthy of ridicule. And because “A Complete Unknown” places most of its attention on Dylan’s personal relationships rather than his art, the climax of the film is rendered completely ineffective, more akin to a love triangle than a portrait of a complicated artist.
Despite these issues, “A Complete Unknown” is better than a lot of biopics—if that really means anything when your competition is “Elvis” and “Bohemian Rhapsody.” Unfortunately, however, “A Complete Unknown”’s case of biopic syndrome is terminal, and it fails to recover in its entire two-hour runtime. Now I can only wonder, should Baez receive the “Priscilla” treatment and get her own film? My vote is yes.
