Directors: Miri Navasky, Maeve O’Boyle, Karen O’Connor (USA). Year of Release: 2023
A house in the Californian countryside. Joan Baez tells her interviewer that at 79, she looks good for her age – she’s not wrong. We see her working out on a fitness machine, and explaining to a vocal coach how she can’t always hit the notes that she used to be. She is elegant and articulate, with short grey hair. Every so often, when she is being interviewed, we see a painting of Bob Dylan in the background. We’ll come to him later.
The time structure in I Am A Noise can be slightly confusing. In an apparently contemporary interview we hear Baez saying that she’s been performing on stage for 45 years. Yet she was born in 1941, first performed in 1957 and we see her introduced as an existing star at the 1959 Newport Jazz Festival. In between the film’s flashbacks and readings from her letters, we see footage of her farewell tour in 2019.
Baez remembers being a nervous child, prone to panic attacks, and subject to racist abuse on account of her Mexican father. The family were socially engaged Quakers, her father an academic, who was initally disappointed by her fame, because she wasn’t producing anything. His travels to countries in the Global South taught her some humility. The film’s title comes from a comment in one of her many childhood journals: “I am not a saint. I am a noise.”
Early fame (including performing at the Carnegie Hall as a teenager and a Time cover photo in 1962) disorientated her. Public adulation helped her overcome some of her teenage self-doubt, but the panic attacks continued. For a year she quit the music scene and went on a road tour, accompanied by a woman called Kimmie with whom she had a sexual relationship. She remembers this time very fondly.
Baez’s Quakerite sense of social justice drew her into the Civil Rights movement. We watch her at the March on Washington, listening to Martin Luther King’s “I have a Dream” speech. She accompanies King to the Southern States for a voter registration drive, and we is proudly arrested. She later wrote to her then-husband David Harris: “Nothing makes sense to me but you, me and the revolution.”
And then she met Dylan. I hope I’m not paying too much disrespect to Baez when I say that some of the film’s most spectacular scenes are of a compelling young Dylan on stage. We (I) have become used to a Dylan who is older and wiser, but the sign of this young man singing such profound words is mind-blowing. Baez accompanied him on stage, and arguably made him famous by covering some of his remarkable songs.
Dylan and Baez had an unequal relationship – she admits that he needed to be mothered and she wanted to mother him. Meanwhile, Dylan was becoming more accustomed to the rock star lifestyle, not least the drugs which Baez felt were not for her – for the time at least. When he toured in Britain, she followed him, only to watch him telling news reporters that he had “nobody special” romantically.
Heartbroken, Baez split from Dylan, and moved on to new partners – not least Harris, a leading light in the anti-war movement. They married, and he was jailed for draft dodging while she was pregnant. We never learn why the couple broke up, although Baez remembers this as a time when her demons returned. This caused a long-standing rift with their son Gabriel, which seems to be have been partly resolved, as we see him accompanying her last tour as a percussionist.
Baez’s life was jolted by the end of the Vietnam war, which seemed to remove her sense of purpose. She threw her energies into her music. recording her most successful song Diamonds and Rust, which is also my favourite. She rejoined Dylan on the Rolling Thunder Review tour, although this time she was able to act more independently. Ironically, this was followed by a decade of her own drug addiction, dominated by quaaludes and bad fashion decisions on album covers.
One of the film’s interviewees calls Baez’s voice “one of the purest notes in music history.” To be honest, although I do have one album, I was never a great fan – I always found her voice too pure, containing not enough conflict (I prefer Judas Priest’s version of Diamonds and Rust). But your appreciation of her vocal talent should not seriously affect your enjoyment of a film for which the musical side of Baez’s life is almost incidental when compared to her political and personal history.
As this history is being explained, we dip in and out of a long interview with Baez and her sister Pauline. They look back on their lives, and refer obliquely to their sister Mimi. We gradually learn that Mimi, a dancer who envied her older sister’s fame, married Richard Fariña, with whom she had a semi-successful singing career without reaching Joan’s levels of fame. Richard died in a motorcycle crash when he was 21, and Mimi of cancer in his fifties.
For me the least satisfying part of the film is the final section, where first Mimi accuses their father of inappropriately kissing her. Joan then saw a psychiatrist, after which she was convinced that she too, had been abused. These are serious claims which must be listened to, but I never felt that the film treated them seriously enough. At one stage it says that Joan may be suffering from False Memory Syndrome, and it raises allegations without testing whether they are right or wrong.
Nonetheless, this is a fascinating story of a woman who lived in extraordinary times. Baez is too self-effacing to let the story concentrate on her, but this is not necessary bad, as the people around her are just as interesting. Baez made important music, but the film makes clear that what is more important is that this music was the product of the extraordinary times in which she lived. This is less biography than social history, and all the better for that.
CinePhil 