Joan Baez Thinks Timothée Chalamet Was “Too Clean” to Play Bob Dylan

The question, alas, came right away. “I was hoping the first question would not even have his name,” laughs Joan Baez. Though the folk music icon has fought many battles, perhaps the longest has been her fight against being labeled Bob Dylan’s ex.

“I understand you can’t help it,” Baez continues. “I know I can’t. Once in my life, I had an interview that was just me. It was a German guy, and he gave a whole interview, and he never brought up the name. When we were finished, I said, hallelujah.”

Now, 60 years after her relationship with Dylan—legendary, turbulent, artistically powerful—Baez is used to being asked about him. Not by Dylan himself, though. Last year Dylan gave his seal of approval to A Complete Unknown, a biopic starring Timothée Chalamet as Dylan and Monica Barbaro as Baez. Both got Oscar nominations for their performances.

“I had an interview with Rolling Stone the other day, and they said, ‘Did Bob reach out to you [about the movie]?’ And I said, ‘You’ve been working at Rolling Stone long enough to know the answer to that question,’” Baez says. “He doesn’t reach out to anybody. But I reached out to Monica, and to, I never remember his name, the one who played Pete Seeger.” (That would be Edward Norton.) “We had a long conversation.” Would it be possible for her to reach out to Dylan herself? Baez’s answer is short: “No.”

The now 84-year-old Baez moves slowly and smiles widely, the usual thousand bangles clanging on her wrists. The voice that sang “We Shall Overcome,” amid tear gas and marches on the bridges of Alabama, arrived in Milan recently to present her new book of poems and prose, When You See My Mother, Ask Her to Dance, before visiting the Milanesiana to have a dialogue with Sandro Veronesi.

Though her legendary vibrato is still powerful—she shares it at one point, singing a few lines from Janis Ian’s “One in a Million”—Baez is done with live performance. “I don’t want to tour anymore,” she says. “Too tiring. The tour bus, the transfers—I can’t do it anymore. But writing? Writing is still a way to endure.”

And to remember the past. A Complete Unknown, Baez says, is “not a documentary, it’s a movie. Some of it’s beautiful. The music was beautiful, and some of the acting.

“I think she did a good job,” she adds, referring to Barbaro. “I think he did a very good job. What’s his name? Chalamet. He just needed—he was too clean, probably.”

Baez’s new book includes a poem dedicated to Jimi Hendrix—“I didn’t know him well”—and a focus on her own childhood. “Early in my life, drawing gave me my own identity and was soothing to me. And then it was early childhood trauma. It was abuse, sexual abuse, physical abuse. So all of my life, I had phobias, and I had troubles and anxiety, and I didn’t understand why. But I had good therapists. They helped me function, but the deep problems were still there.” Writing, then, provides her a different kind of therapy.

Childhood is referenced in the book’s title. Baez also speaks of her father, physicist Albert Baez, who refused to work on the Manhattan Project for religious reasons. His influence led Baez to embrace civil disobedience. “I was raised Quaker,” she says. “It’s the only religion that seriously does not go to war. Everybody says ‘you shouldn’t kill anybody’—then they strap on the guns and they go and fight. And the Quakers really won’t do that. They say you can accept suffering, but you can’t inflict suffering.”

It’s a viewpoint she wishes more people in power shared. When asked whether she anticipated Donald Trump being elected president a second time, Baez replies, “No. But no matter what, nobody could have realized, nobody could write it. Nobody could dream it. What we have now is so fast and so destructive. We just can’t let it destroy the heart and the art.”