Review: 'Joan Baez: I Am a Noise" shows the folk legend in her final tour, and contemplating an adventurous life and her personal pain

The documentary “Joan Baez: I Am a Noise” seems to have both the easiest and hardest jobs in documentary filmmaking: Capturing the spirit and passion of Joan Baez, one of the most dynamic and important musicians of the 20th (and now 21st) century.

It’s easy because Baez — both in current interview and performance footage, and in a wealth of archival material — is a force of nature, and just pointing a camera in her direction will yield nuggets of truth, beauty and truth. But it’s hard because she has lived such a life, seemingly being at the major points of American history and being with many of the great names of the era.

Co-directors Miri Nagasaki, Maeve O’Boyle and Karen O’Connor get all that, but they also get something else: Access to Baez’ private writings — letters to her family, journal entries and drawings (which are the foundation for some haunting animation) that chronicle a lifetime of struggling with depression, anxiety and possibly abuse.

The story starts at the end, with Baez at home in California, preparing to go out on her 2018 concert tour — her last, she says, though she’s reluctant to call it a farewell tour. (That reluctance doesn’t last long, since the name of the tour is “Fare Thee Well,” the title of the song with which she ends each concert.) The tour becomes the documentary’s through line, with the filmmakers backstage and on the tour bus, hanging out with Baez and her musicians (including her son, drummer Gabriel Harris).

Threading through the tour are the memories Baez shares about her childhood in California, the racism she endured because of her Mexican heritage (on her mother’s side), and the early performances with her younger sister, Mimi, that gained the attention of the music industry — launching her career in the New York folk scene.

Memories of her activism also spring forth: Of performing at the March on Washington and hearing Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech; of going on the second Selma-to-Montgomery march, again with Dr. King; of protesting the Vietnam War, marrying activist David Harris, and being pregnant (with Gabriel) when Harris was jailed for resisting the draft. 

Harris isn’t the first romance in Baez’s mentioned here. She talks about a relationship with a woman, identified only as Kimmie. And she talks about her time with Bob Dylan, though she doesn’t talk so much about their romantic times as she does the end of the relationship — when she left him during his 1965 U.K. tour. “I couldn’t do the drugs, or the boys’ club,” she said of her departure. “I was this weird little folkie. I just didn’t belong.”

The filmmakers don’t linger on the gossipy stuff, though. The film is more interested in exploring how Baez coped, or didn’t, with her years of anxiety and depression. Baez fared better there than her younger sister, Mimi — a musician in her own right, whose musical and romantic partnership with Richard Fariña ended tragically in 1966, when he was killed in a motorcycle accident. Mimi, then 21, never really recovered from that, Baez says in the film. (Mimi died of cancer in 2001, at age 56.)

Baez is forthright about her late-fame problems — including an addiction to Quaaludes in the ‘70s, and an experience with a hypnotherapist that unearthed memories, possibly false ones, that her father abused her and her two sisters. That experience, she said, put a strain on her relationship with her older sister, Pauline. 

Through the stories, the pain, the history of Baez’s life, the constant was that crystal-pure voice, which we hear often — both in old footage and on her 2018 tour. Baez sometimes talks on camera about how time has slightly withered her voice, but the movie shows that the years have compensated by giving her the wisdom to make the songs resonate on a deeper level.

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‘Joan Baez: I Am a Noise’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, October 13, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Not rated, but probably R for language, descriptions of sexual assault and sexual content, and some drug references. Running time: 113 minutes.