Joan Baez - I Am A Noise: A Legend Looks Back

I recently watched a screener for the new feature length documentary about Joan Baez, subtitled I Am A Noise (from a teenage diary entry). It is, or soon will be, in a theater near you over the next few weeks (see below); and if you are a Baez fan, take my advice and make plans to see it.  Likewise, if you simply appreciate a well-made documentary, you may want to check it out as well, as Joan Baez - I Am A Noise is a thoughtful,  unusually intimate biographical film. Before I talk about the film itself, though, I want to say a few words about its subject:

An iconic singer, activist and public personality, Joan Baez was very much a part of the musical and social ferment that accompanied and in many ways molded the coming of age of the boomer generation in the 1960s, myself included.  Chronologically, Baez is just eight and a half years older than me, but in addition to that head start, she had a couple of other advantages: She was born with what she calls her “gift” – a miraculously beautiful, sonorous singing voice. She also had talent, along with ambition and a strong moral sensibility. And she appeared at just the right time. 

Baez gave her first professional concert in 1958 at age 17 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. With the American folk music scene a-growing, Bob Gibson (a key figure in the folk music revival) invited her to sing at the first Newport Folk Festival in 1959 (which also featured well known musicians in addition to Gibson, like Odetta, Pete Seeger, and The Kingston Trio). The “barefoot madonna” (as someone called Baez) got noticed big time, leading to a recording contract and self-titled first album the following year. Robert Shelton, reviewing her sold out Town Hall concert in late 1960 for the New York Times, raved that Baez’s “superb soprano voice, as lustrous and rich as old gold, flowed purely all evening with a wondrous ease [and her] singing unwound like a spool of satin.” Her next two albums went gold, and by 1961 - age 21 - she was on the cover of Time Magazine, called “the queen of folk.”

While most of her early material consisted of traditional folk and gospel, by the early sixties, the folk environment was rapidly shifting toward more contemporary, socially relevant “protest” songs.  This shift was abetted to a great degree by the emergence of a prodigious young singer-songwriter: Bob Dylan. Dylan’s rapid rise, in turn, was abetted by Baez, who seeing him performing at a small Greenwich Village club, first fell in love with his songwriting and then fell in love with him. She was a marquee star by then, and she began taking the still largely unknown Dylan with her on tour - introducing him, singing duets with him, and giving him short sets of his own.  

Baez also was becoming increasingly active in the civil rights movement. On August 28, 1963, she participated in the storied March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom and heard MLK deliver his eloquent, moving I Have a Dream speech - along with the approximately 250,000 other Americans present at the Great Mall. The difference being that she was up on the stage at the Lincoln Memorial - one of the featured performers at the event, along with Marian Anderson, Mahalia Jackson, Odetta, Peter Paul & Mary (singing Dylan’s Blowin’ in the Wind) and Dylan himself. Joanie sang Oh Freedom and, famously, We Shall Overcome.    

Okay – that’s a sufficient intro.  Baez has had an incredible sixty-year career, and she’s now 81, so obviously there’s a lot more story there. You’ll get a much wider and deeper look at her life in Joan Baez - I Am A Noise. 

What about the film itself? Is it any good?  The short answer, as intimated at the outset, is Yes. 

Co-directors Karen O’Connor, Miri Navasky and Maeve O’Boyle have a long history of working together in documentary film as producers and directors, centering on character-driven stories. But this is their first true biography. O’Connor is a long-time friend of Baez. When, a few years ago, Baez decided - because as she put it, “It was time” - to conclude her six decade singing career with one final tour,  O’Connor approached her with the idea of a documentary (or maybe it was the other way around). Although Baez understood that she would not have any control over the film itself, says OConnor, the star had been taking stock and was ready “to take an unflinching look at her own life - free of hagiography and dewy -eyed nostalgia.” 

Baez allowed the filmmakers to embed themselves with her in her Fare Thee Well Tour in 2019 and in her home. She and her family gave the filmmakers unlimited access to a vast trove of original source material including Joanie’s journals and diaries she kept throughout her life, letters - including audiotaped letters she sent to her family in the early days of her celebrity, which says O’Connor “captured what she was experiencing in real time, rather than recollected from a distant remove.” There were also photographs, home movies from the 1950s, and even tapes of sessions with her therapist!

The filmmakers’ aim was to do something that was personal, almost memoirish, rather than the standard-issue celebrity bio-doc.  So, Joan Baez - I Am A Noise eschews, for the most part, many  of the common doc techniques that tend to objectify the subject and distance the viewer from her. There is no omniscient, authoritative narrator guiding us chronologically through Baez’s life as though it was just a sequence of events. Indeed, I Am a Noise is not strictly chronological but instead hops back and forth from the present to the past and then back again. What narration the film does contain consists of recollections and impressions from Baez herself excerpted from interviews with the team, other interviews from her long career, as well as contemporaneous diary entries (read by a voice artist).  Thankfully, the narrative contains few, if any, talking heads –  no “experts” analyzing the significance of this, that or the other aspect of Baez’s art, experiences, or psyche; no slew of famous acquaintances with illustrative anecdotes. 

This approach gives the viewer the sense of sharing an intimate reminiscence. Baez is revealed as not just a very talented singer, but also as a very bright, sincere, likeable person, quite willing to laugh at herself, reveal her insecurities, acknowledge her weaknesses, confess her regrets, and contemplate it all in the face of advancing age and mortality.

Baez is certainly proud of her accomplishments and seems content with her legacy. On the personal side, though, she remembers that the road was a bumpy one. She recalls a good share of hard times as well as happy ones; sometimes they were both at once. Becoming a superstar at such a young age created difficulties in her relationships with her parents and her sisters, exacerbated by her pre-existing insecurities as well as the anxiety attacks that have plagued her throughout her life. Her dedication to her vocation and to political and human rights activism negatively affected her relationship with her only child, Gabriel (with activist David Harris).  Pointing to her over-arching career as a world-travelling celebrity musician and as an activist “trying to save the world”, Gabriel generously concedes that it had to be tough trying to be a good mother as well.

Even sixty years on there is curiosity about Baez’s famous relationship with Bob Dylan in the early Sixties. She recalls those brief years before that ended as among the happiest of times. But when, as he as ascending into the heights of his genius and popularity, Dylan unceremoniously dumped her in 1965, it was, in her words, “heartbreaking” and “devastating’.

Joan Baez - I Am A Noise is more personal and thus more interesting than many biographical docs.  It is well worth a visit. But it is not concert film, although it does contain many bits of Joan Baez singing – with Dylan, with her sister Mimi, at the March on Washington, in a few concert settings, and on her final tour.  The movie does not idealize or mythologize, but certainly admires and respects Baez  – which, given her life and work, seems wholly appropriate. All in all, Joan Baez - I Am A Noise is a lovely, moving tribute to a true icon – honest, emotional, reflective, very, very human and, in many ways, a mirror to a generation.  

113 minutes

Grade:  A-

The film is in the midst of a national rollout in theaters around the country; in the SF Bay Area, it's now playing in Northern California in San Francisco, Berkeley, Oakland, San Jose, Santa Rosa, and Santa Cruz, and elsewhere. To find a theater and showtimes near you, click HERE.