‘A Complete Unknown’ convincingly turns Monica Barbaro into Joan Baez

On By Littum

game

Talk about throwing whiplash. Is there anything bigger than going from playing a pilot in the US Navy’s Top Gun program to portraying the country’s leading folk singer and civil rights champion?

For actress Monica Barbaro, the disparate performances — staring down Tom Cruise as Phoenix in 2022’s “Top Gun: Maverick” and dueting as Joan Baez with Timothée Chalamet in the new Bob Dylan biopic “A Complete Unknown” (in theaters now) — promise to summon stardom.

“It’s a little overwhelming,” says Barbaro, 35, with a big smile. “I’m looking forward to coming home for the holidays.”

Barbaro grew up in a small town just north of San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge, where she excelled in her elementary school drama performances before leaving to study acting and dance at New York University. She quickly found steady work, landing roles in NBC’s legal drama “Chicago Justice” and opposite Josh Groban and Tony Danza in the Netflix comedy series “The Good Cop.”

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Then came Cruise, followed by Chalamet, and the challenge of a lifetime: to sing and play guitar in the style of one of the most iconic artists in American music history.

Joan Baez, 83 years old and vivacious, was a huge folk star when she met Bob Dylan on the New York music scene in the early 1960s. She had been on the cover of Time magazine; he was new to the Big Apple.

Both were quickly smitten and formed a close personal bond that lasted several years until Dylan’s soaring celebrity derailed their relationship around 1965. “Dylan broke my heart,” Baez said in “I Am A Noise,” a 2023 documentary about her life . “I was just stoned on that talent.”

It took years, but eventually she put the groundbreaking public pairing into perspective. The watershed moment came when she looked at a painting she did of the singer as a young man, “and he was the young face with baby fat, we both had baby fat then and I put his music on and I started crying,” she said to USA TODAY. “All that anger was completely washed away.”

Barbaro reached out to Baez as she prepared for the film. Their conversation was revealing for many reasons, she says, including shedding light on the nature of their split, which is dramatized in “A Complete Unknown.”

“She told me there was a lot of love there, and a lot of disappointment,” says Barbaro. “Not only by walking away from her, but also she just wanted to say something with her music and change the world and speak out about things. At first he was also that voice of protest and then he didn’t want to do that anymore. She was also in love with his potential, but she said she so appreciates what he did with his talent.

Monica Barbaro took on the role of Joan Baez in ‘A Complete Unknown’ with no formal voice or guitar skills

Barbaro had never spent much time singing before, which sounds terrifying – like an actor who has never swum being asked to play Michael Phelps. So she spent an entire year with a vocal coach and guitar teacher, taking lessons a few days a week and practicing daily.

“We started with her iconic qualities, the tight vibrato, the high note, the angelic soaring voice, the very identifiable features,” she says. “It was hard for me because I didn’t have a relationship with my own singing voice at all. So really I just aimed to try to sound like her, even it’s impossible to sound like Joan Baez.”

Barbaro is seen in “A Complete Unknown” accompanying himself with complex fingerpicking on Baez’s trademark Martin six-string. And yet the actress had never played the instrument before.

“I worked on tons—really, the music process for this whole movie overtook my life for a year,” she says. “Finger picking for me was like learning to walk in the 30s. It was a lot.”

For Monica Barbaro, the key to playing Joan Baez was not playing Joan Baez

Ultimately, Barbaro found a way into her character that loosened the reins on her preparation. Suddenly, she stopped pushing herself to emulate Baez and instead encouraged herself to be her own version of the famous performer.

In a recent Baez interview“she talked about perfectionism robbing art of what makes it interesting. So I borrowed that,” says Barbaro. “I needed that for my own work. To be able to let go.”

Barbaro seems both relieved and satisfied with her experience. She even plans to go to a local movie theater with friends when she’s home to see herself in Mangold’s biopic.

In the dark she will be safe. But after this star turn, she may find it more difficult to leave the theater, which is no longer a complete unknown.