"Singing about panic attacks is not something that most singers like to get into – that's kind of touchy territory," says a radio host to Courtney Barnett, the rather hesitant subject of Danny Cohen's duly cautious, meditative documentary.
The melancholic troubadour-rocker is seated offscreen in the opening shot of Anonymous Club, opposite an American whose energetic tone belies the weight of his words. "How is it for you having your work associated with such difficult, unpleasant, painful things?" he continues.
Cohen cuts to Barnett: "Umm," she begins, as if steeling herself to answer. "I think all of my songs are just trying to figure situations and feelings out, um, very openly, and to whoever's willing to listen."
Nearly a decade has elapsed since Barnett first found herself grappling with international acclaim – which began to roll in with the 2013 release of The Double EP: A Sea of Split Peas, with its offbeat combination of deadpan, domestic lyricism and rollicking melodies. (Breakout single Avant Gardener, incidentally, chronicled an anaphylactic episode, and not a panic attack.)
But the Melburnian has never been comfortable in the public eye, and remains demonstrably (and understandably) more adept at expressing herself through song than to random radio hosts.
Shot over the course of three years, Anonymous Club – part observational doc, part diary film – follows the most unassuming of Grammy nominees on tour in support of her second solo album, 2018's Tell Me How You Really Feel. The bus trips across the US, Europe and Asia are broken up by pit stops back in Melbourne, spent at house-sits and sublets or else camped out at the warehouse hub of Milk! Records, the label founded by Barnett and her former partner Jen Cloher in 2012.
Rendered itinerant by the demands of the tour, shuttling between hotel rooms and green rooms and borrowed rooms, she finds solace in clowning with band members Bones Sloane, Dave Mudie and Katie Harkin or, more often, bent over a guitar or a notebook.
To the degree that there's a sense of intimacy here – and that feeling of the curtain being pulled back is the end goal of such documentaries however curated they might be – it reflects the fact that Cohen, himself Melbourne-based, is a longtime collaborator of Barnett's. He's worked with her on a handful of whimsical music videos since 2017, when he had her and Philadelphia's Kurt Vile mime along to each other's vocal parts for their single Over Everything.
Barnett's longstanding discomfort with the trappings of publicity is something that Cohen took care to factor into the design of his first feature-length work.
He chose to shoot on 16mm, giving Anonymous Club the warm-and-fuzzy aura of an old home movie, and recalling Dont Look Back, D.A. Pennebaker's landmark portrait of Bob Dylan on his 1965 tour of England, released in 1967; Cohen's primary touchstone. With his camera customised to record sync sound, Cohen's one-man operation was smaller even than Pennebaker's: a means of keeping the filming process comfortable and low-key.
Central to Dont Look Back is the fact that Dylan and the members of his rotating entourage cavort and bicker without acknowledging the camera's presence: what we see was not staged for us, but rather in spite of us. We feel as though the curtain has been pulled back, revealing something not quite meant for public consumption.
Anonymous Club operates on a different wavelength, however. Especially in the second half of the film – after Barnett, seeking rejuvenation, decides to embark on a solo tour without her band – the artist is wont to directly address Cohen, jokingly showing off her "shoe collection" (four eminently practical pairs) or expressing excitement at the prospect of a haircut.
If your subject can't forget about the camera, try getting her to play to it (or rather, the person holding it) instead.
The exchanges between the two – Cohen and Barnett; director and star – are a little stilted but all the more endearing for it. And yet their conversation remains at the level of small talk, both parties too polite to get into anything unrulier.
Meanwhile, the featured snippets of Barnett's audio diary entries – recorded onto a dictaphone given to her by Cohen; another tool for sidestepping her natural camera-shyness – veer in the opposite direction: "I don't know what the fuck I'm talking about anymore," she confides in a particularly downbeat moment. "I just feel like I'm going around in circles and digging myself a deeper hole."
If such self-flagellating thoughts are likely all too relatable, it could be argued that a public figure giving voice to them has particular value in directing attention towards mental health issues – and/or, if one were to take a cynical line, in fostering the illusion of intimacy that makes the machinery of celebrity tick.
But Barnett (unlike, say, Taylor Swift) has made no secret of her anxious-depressive tendencies – quite the opposite. "I feel stupid, I feel useless, I feel insane," she sings (and would you expect anything less from a song entitled Everybody Here Hates You?).
It is perhaps telling that the first diary entry heard in the film finds Barnett full of doubt – not so much of herself, but of the exercise itself. "Danny, I'm trying to figure out how to delete … everything I've said, because I'm self-conscious about it," she says.
Of course there's no shame in the feelings she describes, but – without the kind of specificity and context that she's long shied away from providing (and with good reason) – her articulation of them here doesn't really add anything to her music. That music would seem the far more fruitful mode of expression, for both her and her fans alike.
Anonymous Club is in cinemas now.
