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“OK, Sofia Coppola, when’s the Joan Baez biopic coming out,” one tweet reads about A Complete Unknown, James Mangold’s new Bob Dylan biopic where Baez, naturally, plays an essential yet secondary role in the story of the musician’s rise to the top. As Monica Barbaro earns an Oscar nomination for her depiction, her Baez is brilliant, but it’s still not enough.

It’s rare to hear Baez talked about without at least a mention of Dylan, but there are countless long, lengthy discussions of Dylan’s greatness without her name ever coming into it. That’s a tale as old as time for women, especially women who align themselves with talented men or dare to stand shoulder to shoulder with the greats. It’s in moments like that where the shadows of sexism seem to cast themselves deep and dark, with the treatment of Baez being a great example.

“I remember a kid came up to me – this was the worst of it, when I really didn’t exist to any of them – some kid came up to me in Germany in a lobby and said, ‘Oh, Miss Baez, can I have an interview with you? Bob wouldn’t give me one’. I said, ‘Fuck you!’ It was horrible. It was really awful,” Baez recalled. In anecdotes like that, it’s easy to forget that she came first and was so much more than Bob’s little support act. For years before anyone even knew Dylan existed, Baez had established herself as one of the leading voices in folk, especially in the realm of protest music. Thanks to her angelic voice and powerful musical contributions to issues of social injustice, she landed on the cover of Time magazine in 1962, before Robert Zimmerman had even adopted the name Bob Dylan, let alone anyone else knowing it.

But Baez didn’t mind. When she met the “scruffy little pale-faced dirty human being” who would become the folk legend in 1961, she was blown away. With more power, more connections and a bigger audience, she essentially took him under her wing, bringing him out on stage to sing duets and teaching her crowds his name for him. In short, there would be no Dylan without Baez, or at least it probably would have taken a lot longer for there to be.

A Complete Unknown goes some way to show that. It also tries its best to show Baez as the fierce woman she is, telling Dylan to “fuck off” or throwing him the middle finger as one of the only people willing to call him out on his lies or bad behaviour. At the same time, Barbaro’s depiction of Baez tries its best to tell her own story through the glances we get of her. It tries to contextualise Baez’s success or show her side of their complex affair. However, as the spotlight stays on Dylan and her story falls by the wayside in favour of his, just like it did in real life, it leaves so much unexplored.

A Complete Unknown draws parallels to Elvis, Baz Luhrmann’s take on the rise of Elvis Presley. Both films try their best to be balanced when retelling the life of these conflicting and often dislikable figures, but as is typically the nature of a biopic of a star, they end up as celebratory flicks. So just as how Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla filled in the blanks of Priscilla Presley’s side of the story and her experience with the person under the well-known public persona, Mangold’s picture leaves gaps for Baez’s own story, which demands to be told.

In many ways, Priscilla gave agency to Priscilla Presley. Before that, she was too often only thought of or spoken of as Elvis’ wife, while also having her actual lived experience of being so ignored in favour of his retelling of the event or the 2D iconic images of their wedding. Now, people know her side of the story. They know how they came to get together, they know her loneliness while history previously only really knew about what he was getting up to while he was away, and they know how she decided to leave, what she moved onto after and who she was as a person was amidst it all.

With Sofia Coppola not only being brave enough to present Elvis as a villain but tenderly tackling Priscilla’s life story with both defiance and humanist care, she feels like the dream candidate for peeling back the shadows shrouding a woman’s own legacy – which is exactly what Joan Baez’s story deserves, being underappreciated for too long barring the times she toured with Dylan or wrote about Dylan.

For a figure as impactful as Baez, who had power long before Dylan came along and worked an incredible and influential career for years after they met, her story deserves so much more than to be nothing but a side-character detail in Dylan’s. Merely shown backstage at his major career moments or stuck in a hotel room watching him write his own hit songs, it’s time to see Baez’s own highlights, her own struggles, her own climb to success and complex thoughts about fame amidst her drive to create. “

Someone get Sofia Coppola on the phone,” another reviewer wrote on Letterboxd, as Barbaro’s Baez creates the buzz of interest in the singer’s own story that feels primed and ready to be told in full.