Since her debut at the age of 18, musician, civil rights campaigner and activist Joan Baez has been on stage for over 60 years. For the now 82-year-old, the personal has always been political, and...
Director trio Miri Navasky, Maeve O’Boyle, and Karen O’Connor’s’s documentary “Joan Baez I Am A Noise” is a fascinating, poignant, and detailed portrait of a legendary folk artist coming to terms with the end of her celebrated musical career. At 82 years old, Baez can still sting, but she understands that her voice isn’t the same as it once was. This has led her to officially retire from the stage and turn her focus to painting and self-reflection.
Baez was at the height of her popularity in her 20s, a trailblazer in the music world of the counterculture era of the 1960s. She was staunchly opposed to the Vietnam War and was a champion for civil rights, using her rising stardom to write songs of protest and social justice. This has insured the history books will take note that Baez is not only one of the most famous American folk songwriters and musicians, but she is also one who revolutionized and popularized socially conscious music. Baez has recorded over 30 albums and has never stopped inserting messages of peace and equality into her songs. The documentary celebrates this art of activism and entertainment, but also paints a frank, intimate portrait of the life and circumstances that shaped Baez from the beginning.
This isn’t a dryly conventional biopic-style documentary, nor is it a film where the subject’s friends, family, and colleagues agree to glowing talking head interviews that amount to nothing more than exaggerated praise. This is not a life story that’s guarded by nostalgia. The film is a very real, honest look at a life well lived, something that feels like an all-access pass into the singer’s entire private life. The directors pull off this achievement by not only following Baez on her final “Fare Thee Well” tour, but by cracking open her extensive archives, which include home movies, audio recordings, original artwork, private diaries, personal letters, and even therapy tapes. There is a lot of extremely interesting material here, but the best stories come directly from Baez herself.
Baez is interviewed with a friendly, informal style, which makes for a fully immersive experience. At times I felt like I was sitting right there in Joan’s living room having a casual conversation about different periods in her life. This approach aids both the audience and subject, as Baez is exceptionally candid about her life onstage and off, including her decades-long struggles with mental illness, a relationship with Bob Dylan that left her brokenhearted, her pacifist political views, excessive drug use and the creative process, her struggle with coming to terms with the fact that she was an absent mother to her son, and acknowledging painful trauma from her past. This is the whole truth of Baez’s life, and it comes full circle as she ruminates on forgiveness, accomplishment, sadness, and aging.
Highly emotional, detailed, and entertaining, “Joan Baez I Am A Noise” is an impressive documentary about an absolute icon.
