As the last leg of the discussion surrounding the 97th Academy Awards runs its course, James Mangold’s biopic A Complete Unknown continues to spark conversation, much like the man its based on, revolutionary songwriter and Nobel Prize laureate Bob Dylan.
Timothee Chalamet, a charmer, rising above the ranks of a dwindling Hollywood in desperate need of its next movie star, carried the film with his polarising depiction of Dylan. His performance roused mixed reviews and a coveted Oscar nomination for Best Actor (losing to Adrien Brody’s performance in The Brutalist). Chalamet’s Dylan was lauded as accurate in some ways (his musical renditions of Dylan’s hits) and gimmicky in others (his one-note impression of the 60’s Dylan accent).
While Chalamet’s reprisal of Bob Dylan in the film fell in line with all the other iconic roles he has portrayed so far, the role that proved itself a showstopper however, garnering a Best Supporting Actress nomination, was Monica Barbaro’s iteration of Dylan’s tumultuous lover, and legend in the folk music revivalist movement, Joan Baez.
The tradition of Western songwriting
The trade of songwriting has long relied on two key elements: storytelling and human emotion. The lyrics of popular Western music in the 21st century tend to use details to set scenes the audience is likely to have never been a part of (for example, ‘dancing barefoot on the grass’ in Ed Sheeran’s ‘Perfect’, Shakespearean parties and ballgowns in Taylor Swift’s ‘Love Story’). This feature stems from the tradition of cowboy songs sung around campfires in 19th century Texas, whose narrative-oriented lyrics borrowed from traditional European folk ballads.
These cowboy songs were published in songbooks, with Songs of the Cowboys by N. Howard “Jack” Thorp being the first ever book of Western music, at the turn of the 20th century. These books were unaccompanied by notations or any musical structure, which indicates an emphasis on the story rather than the means of conveying it.
Eventually, songs began to embody a variety of experiences and became vessels for emotion as well. A culture of rural African-American Blues music began to develop simultaneously with cowboy songs. This music features balladistic chords, yells, emotionally-charged singing, which, over time, combined with the complex narratives of folk music to form the foundations of Western popular music.
The role of the muse
As celebrity culture began to take shape in the mid-to-late 20th century, the confessional songwriting of Western music found itself warped with the persona of its writers. Even the biggest artists of this era, The Beatles, let go of their easily relatable, feeling-heavy love songs from the early 1960s and gave way to documentations of their escapades with certain substances (‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’). Paul McCartney’s sincerity, John Lennon’s activism, George Harrison’s spirituality, and Ringo Starr’s absurdism found their place in the lyrics of their music.
And so, their very public love lives also clung onto their lyrics. Harrison’s wife, Pattie Boyd, is famously associated with The Beatles’ ‘Something’, widely regarded as one of the greatest love songs of all time. She is also the subject of Harrison’s then-buddy Eric Clapton’s ‘Wonderful Tonight’, which is also regarded as one of the greatest love songs. These very public affairs were fodder for much sensation and folklore.
Boyd is a prominent example of a musician’s muse. Similarly, Courtney Love came to be known as Kurt Cobain’s muse, and Carrie Fisher Paul Simon’s. Songwriting became a means of airing dirty laundry, a means of humanising and isolating the celebrity behind the lyrics.
Bob Dylan had a slew of muses himself. His ex-wife Sara Lownds (in ‘Sara’), 60’s it-girl Edie Sedgwick (‘Like a Rolling Stone’), and Joan Baez. But Baez was never one to let the last word go.
Against all odds
Joan Baez is an artist who cannot be flattened to a mere muse or a side character in Dylan’s rise to fame. A Complete Unknown depicts Baez’s integral role in Dylan’s rise to fame, but brushes her to the sidelines once Dylan blows up, reserving all its space for his idiosyncrasies. Her presence in the history of Western music is far more pronounced than her on-and-off love and now-and-then collaborations with Bob Dylan. His lines from ‘She Belongs To Me’, describe this best: “She never stumbles / she’s got no place to fall / She’s nobody’s child / the law can’t touch her at all”. While Dylan pulled crowds with his protest music (‘Blowin’ in the Wind’) in the early 60s but eventually moved away from such subject matters, Baez continued lending her operatic vocals and razor-sharp pen for the movement.
From opening organisations, teaching non-violent protest to getting arrested multiple times in the 60s for her participation in anti-war marches, Baez never stopped showing up, risking her security, and performing music for those who she believed to be disadvantaged and targeted. But her music undoubtedly forayed into her personal life, and much to her audience’s pleasure, Dylan. Her songwriting magnum opus, ‘Diamonds and Rust’, of its eponymous 1975 album, has a meta quality to it, showing an awareness of how invested the listener would be in Bob Dylan as a muse.
She lyrically asserts herself as a catalyst to Dylan’s rise to stardom with sarcasm (You came onto the scene/ already a legend). This refers to her covering his earlier songs, such as the seminal ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’, and inviting him onstage at various folk music festivals, where she used her established fame to draw ears to Dylan’s tunes. Where Dylan’s storytelling summarises, Baez’s elaborates. While the central idea of ‘Diamonds and Rust’ is Dylan’s dismissal of her and her writing, the primary emotion is the pain that 10 years of memories can bring.
“As I remember, your eyes were bluer than robin’s eggs / my poetry was lousy, you said”. These lines show Baez’s affinity to snarkiness, inserting an undeniably “lousy” comparison of Dylan’s eyes to robins’ eggs to assure Dylan and the listener that she is talented enough to determine the quality of her writing without his approval.
She has, to this day, maintained this attitude towards Dylan, and has never let his towering success undermine her idea of who she is. She expressed positive sentiments about Monica Barbaro’s depiction of her in the film, saying this about her role: “When he walked into the room, he took up all the oxygen. And so my part was always diminished in his presence. And in that sense the film is accurate.”
While A Complete Unknown barely scratches the surface of Joan Baez as a person, and a writer, it captures her unwavering belief in herself and her need to assert her status regardless of who she confronts. This can be seen in her retorts to Chalamet as Dylan, as she tells the legend to his face, “You’re full of s***”.
Published – March 21, 2025 08:30 am IST
