This is the weekend for music movies. Well, for us older folks. Next week the Taylor Swift concert movie will be hitting the screenings. This weekend, they’re re-releasing the Talking Heads movie “Stop Making Sense” and this documentary: Joan Baez – I Am A Noise.
I love when a documentary tells me about a subject I knew nothing about, or if it’s about someone I know a lot about, they give me stuff I wasn’t aware of. This biopic/documentary isn’t traditional. Sure, we see some archival footage of interviews and concert scenes. We also get home movies, diary entries, drawings, all while following Joan Baez on her farewell tour in 2018 (while in her early 80s and still looking beautiful).
They cover her father always moving with the family (she has two sisters, one who was also a singer/guitarist). They’re Quakers, and a lot of that upbringing is what lead her down the path of being a peaceful activist.
I was glad they covered her romance with Bob Dylan. We see her working with Martin Luther King, Jr. You’ll get teary eyed hearing stories about both those legends.
Baez was half Mexican, and she had to deal with some racism. At 20, she had already made the cover of Time Magazine and was playing big venues, but we find out she was fighting major depression, anxiety attacks, and insomnia.
But, the audio clips they play from her therapy sessions were a bit bizarre. And one thing they keep doing, is playing a guy hypnotizing her (my wife was saying, “This is going to put ME to sleep.”). I thought that was all a bit corny, and when it comes to a section in the documentary where we find out she might have been abused by her father – that is rather frustrating. You’re left wondering if her father was sexually abusing the three girls, or the therapist is coaxing her into believing this. When Baez is awake, the only memory she has of her dad doing something suspicious, was when she woke up and he was laying next to her and he said “Shut your eyes, and don’t look at me.” Another sister’s only memory of her dad doing anything, was a time he supposedly kissed her on the mouth and “used his tongue.”
It was adorable seeing Baez working her vocal chords in preparation of her last tour, and her dog howling along with her.
We see her son is the drummer in her band, and it’s cute when he does a bongo solo and she pulls out her phone and starts filming him from the stage.
We see a quick montage of her doing meet-and-greets with fans after a show, and if you blink, you miss that one pair of fans are Bill and Hillary Clinton.
At two hours, this is a bit long, and there are boring stretches when it meanders. It’s probably just for fans of 60s music or Joan Baez.
2 ½ stars out of 5.