A COMPLETE UNKNOWN:  FILM REVIEW , Alaina Demopoulos (The Guardian, 01.15.2025)

The film A Complete Unknown has sparked interest in the folk singers’ doomed romance, and with it the realization that a similar dynamic is ‘happening to girls everywhere’

Lynda Saldana saw A Complete Unknown on the day it opened – partly because she’s a Bob Dylan fan, and partly because she loves Timothée Chalamet, who plays the folk rock icon during his breakout black turtleneck years. But one supporting character stood out more: the folk legend Joan Baez, played by Monica Barbaro. Saldana had never heard of Baez, but watching Baez and Dylan’s on-again, off-again relationship on screen made her eager to learn more. What happened between them? Did they end up together? “I had to look up their lore,” Saldana said.

Saldana, who is 19 and a sophomore at the University of Arizona, is not the only young woman studying up on Baez’s decades-long career – and especially where it intersected with Dylan’s. Saldana found TikTok fan edits of the duo performing together at the 1964 Newport Folk festival, and clips from a 2023 documentary in which Baez called the romance “totally demoralizing

Lynda Saldana said Baez and Dylan had ‘the OG situationship’.Photograph: TiKTok user @lyndamariebby (Lynda Saldana)

Saldana couldn’t help but relate. “He would be there for her, go to his other girlfriends, and then come back,” she said. “She couldn’t let go, even though she knew it wasn’t good for her. That is so real. It’s currently happening to girls everywhere, and it’s happening in the 60s?”

Baez met Dylan at Gerde’s Folk City, a Greenwich Village venue, in 1961, when she was a bonafide star and he was new to the scene. They became creative partners, with Baez believing she  inspired Dylan classics such as Visions of Johanna and Like a Rolling Stone. Dylan ended the relationship in 1965 as he shot into superstardom, and Baez has since forgiven him for breaking her heart: “We were stupid, and you can’t blame somebody for ever. I certainly tried but finally stopped.”

As Saldana later posted in a  TikTok., Baez and Dylan had “the OG situationship”.

Now 84, Baez has emerged as the unlikely hero of A Complete Unknown:  yet another woman who stepped out from the shadow of a terrible, guitar-playing alt boy.

“I love joan baez because I too have had a loser male musician who bares a striking resemblance to timothee chalamet use our situationship as character development and steal parts of my unique and lovely personality as content for his music career,” reads the caption  to one TikTok of a woman lip-synching to Baez singing Dylan’s It Ain’t Me Babe.

“I love Joan Baez cause she said eff that man,”  says another woman’s post. “True baddie Latina icon.” (Baez’s father was the Mexican American physicist Albert Baez.)

Another  clip analyzes their Newport performance of It Ain’t Me Babe, when Baez and Dylan shared the microphone. “Whenever I see this video of Bob and Joan it lowkey fills me with annoyance,” the creator wrote in a caption. “I’ve always loved him but ever since watching the biopic it’s like sir why are you SCREAMING over her.” (One counterpoint, per a comment: “that’s just how he sings I’m afraid.”)

Monica Barbaro as Joan Baez in A Complete Unknown. Photograph: Searchlight Pictures/PA

Stephen Petrus, a scholar of 1960s folk music and director of public history programs at LaGuardia Community College, believes that gen Z is “expressing solidarity” with Baez online. “I think there was a sense of mutual opportunism between the pair,” he said. “But Dylan was not always kind to her, and he wanted to be the dominant one on stage, which is pretty clear both in the movie and certain performances.”

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Baez has long been a lightning rod for projection. With her angelic face, long black hair and penchant for performing barefoot in the early days, she earned the nickname of “Madonna”, becoming one of the best-known voices in the 1960s anti-violence movement. Joan Didion would later lightly critique  Baez’s revolutionary image as superficial: “[Baez] is in a sense the hapless victim of what others have seen in her, written about her, wanted her to be and not to be,” Didion wrote in an essay included in her 1968 collection Slouching Towards Bethlehem.

Today’s appraisals give more credit to Baez as one of Dylan’s most enduring muses.

Marianne Natoli, a content creator based in New York, posted an explainer video breaking down the history of their relationship in the style of an E! News segment. “She is a better woman than I could ever be,” Natoli says in the clip. “No way could I date a pre-fame Bob Dylan, launch his career and then be done dirty, tossed aside. I would never shut up about it.”

‘No way could I date a pre-fame Bob Dylan, launch his career and then be done dirty, tossed aside,’ said Marianne Natoli. Photograph: TikTok user @hey_marrianne (Marianne Natoli)

Deidre Rodriguez, a 28-year-old singer who fronts the Austin band Red and the Rebels posted a video digging at Dylan for fumbling Baez: “How do you bag this woman and then mess it up?”

But Rodriguez also believes that Baez’s younger fans who came of age during the #MeToo movement have a better awareness of power imbalances in relationships. “We’re talking about this relationship in a serious way now, because they didn’t have the language we do now to describe these behaviors,” she said. “We have so much more knowledge of how the patriarchal system impacts women, particularly women of color, and especially in the music industry.”

Though Baez is not on TikTok, her granddaughter, the singer and Baez’s full-on doppelganger Jasmine Harris, is. Harris regularly posts videos with Baez, who comes off as spirited and youthful. In one clip, Harris, a student at the University of Miami, plays Baez a bad acoustic song she says a “frat boy” wrote for her, while Baez mocks the overwrought lyrics. Baez and Harris also attended a Phoebe Bridgers concert together with the indie superstar.

For Saldana, the new Baez fan, discovering the singer’s life on TikTok means she’s listened to her music too. Saldana especially enjoys her version of It Ain’t Me Babe, and Diamonds and Rust, the 1975 confessional Baez penned about her relationship with Dylan. For a generation accustomed to modern dating drudgery,  lyrics like “Well I’ll be damned / here comes your ghost again” still hit.

“I’m seeing so many people be like, ‘Why am I literally Joan Baez  right now?’” Saldana said. “I just discovered her, and I’m also in her exact same position. It’s like watching Sex and the City and realizing you’re Carrie.”