Compare the “It Ain’t Me Babe” Scene from A Complete Unknown to the Real Bob Dylan & Joan Baez Performance at the Newport Folk Festival
A Complete Unknown, the new movie about Bob Dylan’s rise in the folk-music scene of the early nineteen-sixties and subsequent electrified break with it, has been praised for not taking excessive liberties, at least by the standards of popular music biopics. Its conversion of a real chapter of cultural history has entailed various conflations, compressions, and rearrangements, but you’d expect that from a Hollywood director like James Mangold. What many viewers’ judgment will come down to is less historical veracity than whether they believe Timothée Chalamet as the young Bob Dylan — or rather, as the young Bob Dylan they’ve always imagined.
Still, much depends on the rest of the cast, who portray a host of major folk- and folk-adjacent figures including Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, Johnny Cash, Alan Lomax, and the late Peter Yarrow. No performance apart from Chalamet’s has received as much attention as Monica Barbaro’s Joan Baez. In those characters’ key scene together they take the stage at the 1964 Newport Folk Festival and sing “It Ain’t Me Babe,” a Dylan song that Baez also recorded. Their rendition conveys the depth of their romantic and artistic connection not just to the audience, but also to Dylan’s girlfriend, played by Elle Fanning, watching just offstage.
“That idea of the secret is really what I needed to drive the scene,” says Mangold, using the language of his trade, in the Variety video at the top of the post. “Ultimately, I’ve got to get it to where Elle is driven away by whatever she’s seen on stage. But it wouldn’t have worked as well if Chalamet and Barbaro hadn’t nailed the performance, just one of many in the film shot 100 percent live. If you’d like to compare them to the real thing, have a look at the footage of Dylan and Baez singing “It Ain’t Me Babe” at the actual 1964 Newport Folk Festival just above. After that, you may want to go back to the previous year’s festival and watch their performance of “With God on Our Side” — and, while you’re at it, listen to Dylan’s entire catalog all over again.
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Joan Baez Live in 1965: Full Concert
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.