Joan Baez: I Am a Noise

 

Directors Miri Navasky, Maeve O'Boyle and Karen O'Connor's touching and illuminating documentary Joan Baez: I Am a Noise is only secondarily a musical retrospective. 

It is primarily an exploration of the spirit of an 82-year-old woman who has been both gifted with a heavenly voice and social consciousness and tortured by demons she's never fully understood.

The film is bookended by Baez's preparation for a final tour after many years of absence from the stage and includes family footage mostly shot by her father, a Mexican immigrant who was an accomplished physics professor. Baez recounts being plagued by depression and anxiety as a child, conditions she would struggle with for the rest of her life and the cause of which is suggested but not firmly established.

Her public story is familiar to many -- her relationships with Bob Dylan, whom she introduced to public audiences in the early '60s, and anti-war activist David Harris, whom she would marry and with whom she had a son, Gabriel. Many already know of her participation in Civil Rights protests in the South and world peace campaigns all over the country.

Less familiar would be the parts of her story that involved her sisters -- Pauline and Mimi -- and their varying degrees of closeness and distance, support and resentment, and the impact her parents would have on both her success and her despondency.  

Themes of personal and familial unhappiness course through this riveting picture, which incorporates live and recorded performances by Baez and footage of her social justice work. 

Though she no longer has the clarion soprano of her youth, her voice is still lovely and her convictions have not waned, despite the fierce battles she has waged to maintain her sanity and emotional wholeness. 

A scene of Baez dancing barefoot to a drum squad in a Paris street is so joyful we forget for a minute her struggles with stifling sadness, most achingly portrayed in passages and drawings from her childhood journals. 

Hers has been both an incredibly public and private existence that has enriched the world in incalculable ways. The picture is a loving and vital tribute to a remarkable woman.