Review of the film: Joan Baez has songs to sing and truths to reveal in this new documentary, despite her diminished voice.
Bob Dylan referred to it as her “heart-stopping soprano,” and it is true that you could think we would succeed when Joan Baez sang the protest song “We Shall Overcome” with her pure, angelic voice.
Of course, the well-known folk singer and activist was singing about civil rights. However, as we discover in the insightful, exhaustive, and occasionally horrifyingly personal “Joan Baez: I Am a Noise,” Baez was also attempting to overcome a number of personal obstacles, including loneliness, anxiety, and, towards the end of her life, unsettling repressed memories of her own father.
That may seem like a lot to cover in 113 minutes, but that’s because the singer recounts her 60-year singing career in interviews and an amazing amount of archive footage in the new documentary, which was directed by Maeve O’Boyle, Miri Navasky, and Karen O’Connor. For the first time, we witness Baez walking inside a storage unit that her late mother had completely stocked with pictures, home movies, audio files, sketches, letters, and even therapy session cassettes.
She also handed the key to her directors. Originally, the movie was only going to document Baez’s final 2018 “Fare Thee Well” tour; however, Baez made the decision to leave a more comprehensive legacy.
Novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s statement that each person has three lives—public, private, and secret—opens the movie. This is definitely fitting for Baez, who became an overnight sensation in 1959 at the age of eighteen, when she picked up a guitar and developed a distinctive bell-like voice. She went on to record about 40 albums and was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2017. She concealed some dark secrets and a tough private existence behind her intensely public persona, as evidenced by her own agonizing letters and drawings from her early years.
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