Movie review: 'Joan Baez I Am a Noise' captures voice of iconic artist

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Oct 16

Executive produced by Patti Smith, "Joan Baez I Am a Noise" begins with the artist digging through a large collection of notebooks, drawings, videotapes and recordings. She is excavating one of the most remarkable and notably political artistic careers in American history. A lifelong advocate for civil rights and a staunch, early opponent of the war in Vietnam (and later the war in Iraq), Baez has combined musical stardom with political outspokenness in ways that few have before or after her heyday. For people who grew up in the 1960s, Baez, who made her debut on Harvard Radio and in clubs in Boston and Cambridge in the late 1950s, was a powerful voice in more ways than one.

A tall, slender, olive-skinned "Madonna" as she was often described, Baez was hard to pin down. Was she white? Was she Black? Both? As it turns out, the artist, who spent 60 years on the road, performing and trying to make the world a better place, was of Mexican descent with a Quaker background.

The film, directed by "Frontline" veterans Miri Navasky, Maeve O'Boyle and Karen O'Connor, isn't as interested in the music as it is in the evolving mind and social consciousness of the artist, beginning with a bit of writing entitled "What I Believe" by 13-year-old "Joanie" Baez. The film's subject is a genius. But the film often seems like a semester-long course, taught by and all about Baez.

She was a sensitive kid, worried about the disadvantaged, moody, tormented by feelings of inadequacy and inferiority. At the same time, we accompany the present-day Baez, who is known to press her own costumes, on a sold-out, small-venue concert tour where her son Gabe Harris serves as drummer and percussionist. Joan's late, older sister Pauline long since moved away to the Carmel Valley in Northern California. Her late, younger sister Mimi, who for a time imitated Joan, married musician and author Richard Farina. The present-day Baez runs out of her hotel in Paris to dance barefoot in the street.

This Joan is not much different from the one who recorded songs by a young folk/protest singer named Bob Dylan, whom she invited onstage at her shows, giving his fledgling career a boost. The two perform together again at the 1963 March on Washington. Baez singing "We Shall Overcome" at that march is a hugely important moment in American history. She and Dylan were lovers. But "Joan Baez I Am a Noise" is not a comprehensive study of that relationship, although Baez does allow that, "Dylan broke my heart." We hear about a more recent relationship she has had "after men." We flash back to Selma and Montgomery. She remains a beloved star to Black people. She spent over a month in jail in 1967 for blocking the entrance of an Armed Forces Induction Center in Oakland, California.

The new interviews with Baez are refreshingly candid. Describing her marriage to anti-Vietnam War protester David Harris, she says, "He was too young; I was too crazy," although she "loved being a mom." Back with Dylan for the famous Rolling Thunder Revue, Baez becomes too fond of Quaaludes. After a lifetime in therapy, Baez comes to believe that she was sexually abused by her father, something her father, who died in 2007, vehemently denies on tape. Is she a victim of false memory syndrome? "The woods are lovely, dark and deep," Baez intones, quoting Robert Frost's "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" by way of farewell, although at 82 she remains, a gray giant.

("Joan Baez I Am a Noise" contains mature themes)