A Short History of Joan Baez Calling Bob Dylan on His Bullshit

In its retelling of Bob Dylan’s rise through the Greenwich Village folk scene and eventual decision to go electric at the Newport Folk Festival, A Complete Unknown is unafraid to indulge in a few flights of fancy — scenes that blatantly didn’t occur as written, but that nonetheless consolidate some larger idea about Dylan. In one of the more egregious instances, the Cuban Missile Crisis is happening, and panic strikes New York City, where Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro) is shown frantically packing a suitcase then racing out into the streets. After failing to hail a cab, she’s drawn into the Gaslight Cafe by a familiar voice — it’s Dylan, of course, rising to the moment by performing “Masters of War.” He finishes the anti-war dirge, grunts something about finding someone to love in troubled times, and passionately makes out with Baez on his way out the door, cheating on his girlfriend in the process.

The worst version of Complete Unknown would have included much more of that kind of schlock — with Timmy-as-Bob proceeding to Forrest Gump his way through the early ’60s, an audience of slack-jawed onlookers occasionally asking “who wrote this song?!!” (There’s a fair amount of that in the film, as is.) What makes the movie work, though, is what happens immediately after that scene: Baez calls Dylan on his bullshit. After waking up together, the two discuss music and how they each learned to play guitar. Speaking in his phony, placeless accent, Dylan claims he worked in a traveling carnival as a kid and learned to play some “funny chords” from a nomadic cowboy named “Wigglefoot.” Clearly used to people indulging his beatnik self-mythologizing, he looks briefly stunned at Baez’s response: “You’re full of shit.”

In covering Dylan’s rapid evolution from Woody Guthrie acolyte in 1961 to impish rock star in 1965, Complete Unknown charts a tumultuous few years in his relationship with Baez — from their early encounters as mutual admirers, to the period when a then-ascendant Baez helped Dylan’s career by covering his songs, to the juncture when Dylan became bigger than either of them could have imagined. Along the way, the movie also presents a biopic-ified version of their on-again-off-again romance, in which the primary tension — apart from Dylan’s general assholery — is the fact that era-defining songs pour out of him while Baez struggles to write anything. (Her effortful, ornate songs, Dylan says in the film, are like the oil paintings in a dentist’s office.) In one effective inversion of a music-biopic trope, Dylan stops by the Chelsea Hotel to hook up with Baez. Afterward, in a fit of inspiration, he sits at a desk in his underwear to eke out a few key lines of “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding).” Rather than being impressed, Baez calls him out. “Why did you come here?” she asks. “To make me watch you write?”

Whatever factual liberties the movie takes with their relationship, it successfully continues one of the best threads from the major Dylan documentaries — including D.A. Pennebaker’s Dont Look Back and the two Martin Scorsese films, No Direction Home and Rolling Thunder Revue, which collectively remain the best cinematic articulations of Dylan’s whole Thing. In each of them, Baez undercuts Dylan’s lore-building in ways that aren’t only hilarious, but essential to piercing the smoke and mirrors he cloaks himself in. Over the course of his now six-decade-plus career, Dylan’s mythology has grown fungible enough that it can absorb anything that’s thrown at it. A sharp left turn into Christian music? Sure. Neglecting to show up to the ceremony to receive his Nobel Prize? Of course. Recording a song for the hagiographic Ronald Reagan movie but not his own biopic? That’s Bob for you. In most of these scenarios, Dylan himself was in control, toying with how we perceive him and obfuscating any glimpses into who he actually is. Baez, thankfully, has always been able to puncture the façade.

Dont Look Back, Pennebaker’s 1967 documentary (currently streaming for free on the Criterion Channel), tracks Dylan’s 1965 tour across England, which occurred right before the endpoint of A Complete Unknown and finds Dylan at his spikiest, leaning into the idea of celebrity as performance and sparring with any journalist who dares to slap a label on him. At one point, Dylan is in the backseat of a car, sunglasses on, reading a newspaper with a headline about himself on the front page and occasionally talking to the musician John Mayall, who’s crammed into the middle seat. Baez, meanwhile, sits on the other side wearing a cowboy hat, lazily eating a banana and looking thoroughly bored. As the two men mumble, she sings a few lines of Dylan’s then-new song “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue,” changing the word fire to banana. (“Yonder stands your orphan with his gun / Crying like a banana in the sun.”) No one comments on it, but Pennebaker deftly zooms in on Baez, underscoring the moment as one of the few times in the documentary when Dylan is being toyed with rather than doing the toying. (The two ended their romantic relationship after the tour.)

Elsewhere, Baez has undercut Dylan’s lore in less comic ways, such as in No Direction Home, where she’s one of several talking heads to set the record straight on how relatively nonpolitical he actually was, despite the cultural association of him with the civil-rights movement and the youth politics of the ’60s. At protests, Baez says, kids would often ask her where Dylan was, only for her to have to break it to them that he “never” comes. (She also busts out a pretty good impression of the guy in the doc, which she’s used to great effect onstage.)

In the end credits of A Complete Unknown, the film brings its Baez arc to a tidy conclusion, noting that she eventually wrote one of her biggest songs, “Diamonds and Rust,” about her relationship with Dylan. In real life, the two supposedly haven’t interacted in person since 1984 after a disastrous reunion-tour attempt, though they’ve each spoken kindly of each other in various documentaries. While promoting her 2023 documentary Joan Baez: I Am a Noise, Baez told Variety she buried any resentment she had toward Dylan after drawing a portrait of him when he was young and listening back to his early music. She wrote him a letter, she says, explaining how “all of that bullshit” just drained away, and that was that. “I may never see him again,” she said, “and that’s okay too.”