In fact, it’s altogether apt that “I Am a Noise” is opening the same day as Swift’s concert film. Baez offers viewers the opportunity to consider the long lineage of girls with guitars who overcame all manner of obstacles — including a chronically sexist music industry — to make their marks. Indeed, Swift could do worse than looking to Baez, now 82, as a model for how to design the next several years of her life: Both women became sensations as teenagers, which set them on a course for maximum head-messing; Baez, for one, emerges as a radiant, self-aware example of how to survive the circus with body and spirit securely intact.
“I Am a Noise” isn’t a conventional biopic, although it covers the cardinal moments of Baez’s rise to stardom: She grew up in a Quaker family, one of three sisters who were taken around the world so they could learn about other cultures, and be confronted with the realities of poverty and inequality. By the time Joan began to perform at Club 47 in Cambridge, Mass., she was already steeped in social consciousness and nonviolence; she didn’t put on the politics of the era as much as merge them with the preternaturally pure soprano that, combined with her long hair and bare feet, made it easy to cast her as a coffeehouse Madonna.
She admits she initially embraced the persona. But “I Am a Noise” illuminates the darker currents that roiled under the serene exterior. Skillfully directed by Karen O’Connor, Miri Navasky and Maeve O’Boyle, the film gracefully knits together Baez’s childhood journal entries, drawings, family home movies and recent footage of her 2019 farewell tour to give Baez completists what they want, but surprise them as well. Predictably, Baez revisits her sometimes supportive, sometimes competitive relationship with her sister Mimi, who had a promising musical career of her own with husband Richard Fariña. (Older sister Pauline, who was interviewed before she died in 2016, admits she retreated from the spotlight entirely, preferring to “sew and build mud houses” as a visual artist.)
And, because fan service must be respected even when it comes to Baez, she goes into disarming detail about her love affair with young “Bobby” Dylan, who would callously cast her aside during that fateful tour in England. (One of the film’s most joyous sequences captures a giddily ecstatic duet on “It Ain’t Me, Babe.”) Of the later heartbreak, Baez is resigned. “I was totally demoralized. It was horrible,” she says, bringing a mug to her lips and waving at the camera. “Hi, Bob!”
Clearly, she has moved on: Baez’s painting of Dylan hangs over the piano where she practices with a vocal coach before going on the road; even though “I Am a Noise” chronicles Baez’s years marching with the likes of Martin Luther King Jr. and antiwar protesters, she’s philosophical about her missteps, from a misguided stint with quaaludes to an even more misguided stint trying to hang with young pop stars on the Amnesty International tour (“Oy, vat a dope,” she says in a convincing Yiddish accent).
Throughout “I Am a Noise,” Baez is a funny, frank, silkily charismatic narrator of her own life, even when it comes to the crippling anxiety attacks she suffered since her teenage years. The directors handle those mental health struggles with impressive sensitivity and finesse, subtly dropping clues to a big reveal yet to come. Ninety minutes in, Baez recalls confronting that mystery when she turned 50, got therapy and began to grapple with childhood trauma. (In addition to Baez’s music and Sarah Lynch’s gorgeous musical score, “I Am a Noise” features soothing tapes made by Baez’s therapist.) The revelations will unsettle many viewers, but they also help demystify an icon whose transparency can only be described as exhilaratingly brave.
There are so many profound scenes in “I Am a Noise,” from a full-circle moment when Baez reprises “It Ain’t Me, Babe” to a lyrical gesture when her dying mother gently and lovingly runs her hand through Baez’s silver hair. Throughout the film, it’s Baez who holds the audience spellbound, not just in live performances that remained transfixing from the late 1950s to the 2010s, but in her very being. She was never a Madonna, but she’s achieved a form of transcendence nonetheless, a beatific blend of strength and acceptance that lifts, consoles and inspires.
Unrated. At area theaters. Contains brief smoking and drug references. 109 minutes.