‘Joan Baez: I Am a Noise’
good for my age, but there is a limit,” she quips of upcoming retirement. As for her voice, it’s there, but definitely lower and more ragged.
Amid concert footage, we toggle to scenes of Baez’s youth. We also hear, on and off, a strange (and rather distracting) male voice sounding like a hypnotist. It turns out to be her therapist.
The story begins with lovely, blackand-white footage of Joan as a child, dancing in a field with her parents and sisters. Her Mexican-born father was dashing. The scenes look idyllic, but there are signs of trouble ahead when, in an interview from the present, Joan notes mysteriously: “I’m way too conflicted to just have a bunch of happy memories.”
We see pages from young Joan’s journal, its copious sketches brought to life by wonderfully inventive animation, and hear how white kids called her “the dumb Mexican” in school. Panic attacks and anxiety set in. Even when she becomes a star, breaking out at the Newport Folk Festival in 1959, her self-image doesn’t seem to thrive. Nestled among the many letters to her parents is a drawing of a very small girl: “This is how I felt on the Carnegie Hall stage.”
And then a charismatic singersongwriter invades her life.
“I was just stoned on that talent,” she says of Dylan. One of the best moments of the film has Baez at the mic, during good times, imitating Dylan imitating her.
But later, on that tour to Britain, he leaves her in his wake. “Dylan broke my heart,” she says.
A new phase sees Baez deeply engaged in protests.