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.

Relat­ed con­tent

Joan Baez Live in 1965: Full Con­cert

Bob Dylan’s His­toric New­port Folk Fes­ti­val Per­for­mances, 1963–1965

Watch Joan Baez Endear­ing­ly Imi­tate Bob Dylan (1972)

The Moment When Bob Dylan Went Elec­tric: Watch Him Play “Maggie’s Farm” at the New­port Folk Fes­ti­val in 1965

A Mas­sive 55-Hour Chrono­log­i­cal Playlist of Bob Dylan Songs: Stream 763 Tracks

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.