Monica Barbaro

In A Complete Unknown (2024), Monica Barbaro's Joan Baez tells Dylan off and means it. James Mangold's film is often content to wait for the next song, but she gives the conversations a little urgency. Her Baez is sharper than the dialogue, and her singing is a pleasure in itself. We enjoyed her impatience because she makes the objections to Dylan sound personal, rather than inserted to give him something to answer.

Her breakthrough came as Phoenix in Top Gun: Maverick (2022), followed by the romantic comedy At Midnight (2023) before she played Baez. Flight training and G-force work for the action film gave way to months of vocal and guitar lessons for A Complete Unknown. That preparation pays off in singing that holds our attention even when Mangold's drama does not. She gives us a musician we can listen to with pleasure and someone whose judgement we take seriously.

In One Night Only (2026), she has a different problem: a romantic comedy whose annual sex exemption is both grim and insufficiently funny. As Allie, she brings warmth to the search for connection, and Callum Turner's Owen is an agreeable partner. We believe that these two want to spend time together, which is more than we believe in the circumstances invented to keep them busy. Their ease is the film's main pleasure, but it cannot make the patchy jokes work.

We would like a comedy that trusts her connection with a partner enough to dispense with the elaborate rules. One Night Only keeps demonstrating the appeal of that simpler film, then returning to a premise its jokes cannot support. Baez suggests something tougher is available too, provided a director gives her lines that match the firmness with which she delivers them. Start with A Complete Unknown for the singing, and accept that the drama is less rewarding.