That it is, but with an unexpected twist: Baez opens up in the film about how she has suffered from severe anxiety attacks all of her life, including when she burst on the international stage at the age of 18 as a voice from heaven, practically the new Virgin Mary.
Replete with footage of Baez's performances and actions as a folksinger and activist, the film also features excerpts from hours of audiotapes, home movies of her childhood, her drawings, and her diaries.
Her connection with Bob Dylan, who supplied the protest songs that her voice demanded, is covered, including how deflated she felt when she was basically rebuffed by him while touring Europe, as documented in the 1967 film "Don't Look Back."
As Baez tells it, she "couldn't" participate in the drug taking that the Boys in the Band were doing on the tour, and she was soon excluded in other ways. Since Dylan turned the Beatles onto marijuana, one wonders why he didn't do the same for Baez. Perhaps because she was a woman, she wasn't invited to the boys' pot parties.
As the film depicts, Baez then married and had a child with anti-war activist David Harris, who went to jail for protesting the draft wile she was pregnant. But the marriage broke up, she says, largely due to her mental health issues.
Her 1975 comeback "Diamonds and Rust" album featured her signature title song about her affair with Dylan ("The Madonna was yours for free..."). But she tells how she then made the mistake of firing her manager in favor of her attractive and drug-taking tour manager, and ended up on Quaaludes for eight years. Footage of her acting uncharacteristically goofy on the 1975-76 Rolling Thunder tour bus and onstage during that time is painful to watch; her explanation is that the drug relaxed her for the first time in her life.
Baez's sister Mimi, who lost her husband and musical partner Richard Farina when he died in a motorcycle accident on her 21st birthday, is shown to be a beautiful dancer and singer who suffered in Joan's huge shadow. A call from Mimi remembering something disturbing that the sisters shared but barely remembered from their childhood sets Joan on a journey of self-exploration to finally uncover the source and nature of her lifelong mental illness. This process involves therapy three days a week, which sounds a lot harder than how I managed to remember a similar yet less traumatic experience from my childhood: taking LSD and then, sometime later, sitting and smoking a little pot and meditating.
In the film we get to follow Joan on her current Farewell Tour, where she sleeps on a bus and irons her son and drummer's shirt ("Don't forget the collar," he says). In Paris, she goes barefoot out into the street to dance to a drumming troupe. Reprising a duet shown in the film that she and Dylan did together in their youth, "It Ain't Me Babe," she nails the song in her "more mature" voice. Her farewell song alone is worth seeing "I Am a Noise" for. Catch it in a theater with a good sound system.
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