Joan Baez Documentary Confronts the Emotional Toll of Music and Activism

In one particularly memorable shot from I Am a Noise, the new documentary about singer-songwriter Joan Baez’s life and career, things go quiet. The landscape is stark. The light is fading. There appears to be vast emptiness in every direction.

Baez, meanwhile, is dancing. Her hands are in the air. There is something spiritual happening. A renewal, maybe, or some other life-perpetuating act.

We see it elsewhere in the film, too. When she hears a rhythm beyond her hotel room, her bare feet carry her across a crowded plaza. She throws her hands up in front of the buskers, angles her face down, bends her knees, and dances. All around her, tourists pull out their smart phones to take photos and video. They are enraptured by the appearance of a global celebrity. They are photographing her persona while she is occupying her self.

All the while, it’s hard to ignore her hands in the air. It is the action of a person on a rollercoaster ride. The action of a person who has chosen to surrender. As I Am a Noise rolls along, it is clear Baez is doing both.

Indeed, through extensive interviews with Baez plus her personal journals, tapes of hypnotherapy sessions, and incredible archival footage, the film revisits all the ups and downs of Baez’s life and career: singing with her family as a child, traveling the world because of her father’s work as a physicist with UNESCO, breaking into the music industry, becoming a beloved performer. In her journals, she writes about her own identity in contrast to that of the people around her, about her loves and wishes and fears.

Joan Baez with James Baldwin and James Forman in “Joan Baez: I Am a Noise,” a Magnolia Pictures release. (Photo by Matt Heron / Courtesy of Magnolia Pictures)

“I am a noise,” she wrote as a child looking out over an unjust world. She determined at a young age to never remain silent. Yet the film explores the ways the men in her life impacted the noises she made. There is her father, who loomed large and, it turned out, was a source of childhood abuse. The film shows her in relationships with Bob Dylan and then, later, the antiwar activist leader David Harris. It digs into the way these two men consumed her life and career in similar but also wildly different ways.

The film also explores her anxiety and panic attacks. We see the aging star with the famous, powerful voice curled on a couch like a child who feels unheard. It’s a difficult visual to stomach, but one must reckon with the unfolding context of Baez’s lifetime.

She emerged onto the folk scene in an era when women were not by any stretch a dominant force in the folk world nor the music industry at large. As she found ways to balance her music career with her pull toward activism (she admits having been “addicted to activism”), she is one of the few women working in the realm of civil rights who managed to get national credit for her contributions.

All this considered, there was little room for her glaring nervous system meltdowns, not that they relented. But there was a persona to keep up. Baez notes the absurdity she felt, hearing people comment on how peaceful and powerful she appeared, when she was reeling with anxiety on the inside. She admits to turning to quaaludes to find her way through it all.

As a piece of journalism or even entertainment, I Am a Noise is less than stunning. The narrative is choppy and disjointed. As a reporter and a fan, watching was not an entirely satisfying experience. The film ends with more questions than conclusions. Granted, Baez herself opines in the film that there is no good time or place to close the door on such a career. Real life doesn’t parade answers at us, after all.

Joan Baez (photo courtesy of Magnolia Pictures)

There are other documentaries that do a more compelling job of spotlighting Baez’s career accomplishments — How Sweet the Sound and Carry It On, specifically — but I Am a Noise’s strength and relevance lies in its admission of the ways her popularity as an artist impacted her relationship with her mental health. Already riddled with anxiety and depression when she began to earn public attention, Baez found the press attention only exacerbated her struggles. The things she was exposed to as an activist would have been trying on anyone’s nervous system, but for Baez they landed on already shaky ground.

Now 82 and retired from touring since 2019, she looks back on this with what seems to be great perspective and optimism, though one wonders if she has found some kind of peace at this stage of life. She is nonetheless open to admitting her shortcomings with grace toward her younger self, who was simply doing the best she could.

In addition to the celebratory dancing we see Baez engage in throughout the film, we also see her swimming at her home in California. Surrounded by a lush landscape and at her home decorated with some of her exquisite paintings, Baez heads into the backyard and dives into the calm water of a pool. Alone, she is consumed, flooded by the water. Here, though, she doesn’t throw up her arms in surrender. Instead, she moves through the water with grace and strength.

An outsider whose body isn’t naturally equipped with the things necessary for a life in the water. Yet, she has learned how to move through it with power and peace. As she does, she barely makes a noise at all.

Joan Baez: I Am a Noise, a Magnolia Pictures release, is playing now in theaters in New York City and expands to Los Angeles and other cities starting Oct. 13.