If you love folk music, you know Joan Baez. If you don’t love folk music, then you might know a couple of Baez songs, that she spent some crucial years around Bob Dylan, marched with Martin Luther King in Selma, and lived one of those 20th-century lives where her personal life was constantly intersecting with history. Her voice was angelic. Her presence was playful, sweet, and goofy. I’ve probably watched a hundred documentaries about music and musicians at this point in my life, and I still get a little charge any time Baez shows up on screen. Her dancing during the Rolling Thunder Revue tour is so free of inhibition you kind of admire it, no matter that it looks a lot like Elaine Benes at an office party. Though, as I learned from Joan Baez: I Am A Noise, Baez probably was high on Quaaludes when cutting those rugs. No matter. High or not, it’s still a sight to behold.

Like the drugs, there’s a lot I didn’t know about Baez that come to the forefront in Miri Navasky, Maeve O’Boyle, and Karen O’Connor’s documentary (yes, you read that right: three directors for this doc). I hope it’s not revealing too much to say that Baez has outlived her parents and two sisters, so her story will likely go down as the authorial record of the events that plague Baez’s life, her struggles with anxiety, depression, and multiple personality disorder—though it’s not as heavy as that sounds. Baez admits she likes the personalities in her head. I imagine most creative types do. They provide material and voice, something anyone who’s sat before the blank page is very much in search of.

Combining contemporary interviews, archival footage, and excerpts from Baez’s journals and diaries, I Am A Noise is framed by Baez’s 2018 Fare Thee Well tour. That could have been a good title for the doc, but the directors opt for a delightful entry from Baez’s diary entry from age 13: “I am not a saint. I am a noise.”

I Am A Noise covers a lot of ground but drags in the middle. And even though many of the guiding topics—abuse, fame, perspective, memory, social justice, therapy, racial identity, sexual orientation—feel like they ought to resonate more now than ever before, I Am A Noise still feels like it’s walking well-tread soil. Joan Baez was certainly unique among her cohorts, but I Am A Noise can’t escape the familiarity of a trip down memory lane.

Joan Baez: I Am A Noise (2023)
Directed by Miri Navasky, Maeve O’Boyle, Karen O’Connor
Produced by Miri Navasky, Karen O’Connor
Magnolia Pictures, Not rated, Running time 113 minutes, Premiered Feb. 17, 2023 at the Berlin International Film Festival.

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