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 …
