The folk singer and counterculture veteran Joan Baez is the subject of this intimate and painful documentary, which brings us to the brink of a terribly traumatic revelation that it can’t quite bear to spell out.
The film follows Baez on her 2018 Fare Thee Well goodbye tour and was evidently filmed over a number of years – long enough to include an interview with a sister who has since died, and to show heart-rending footage of Baez tending to her very elderly mother who has also now gone. We see Baez storming it in venues all over the US, with starry names such as Bill and Hillary Clinton coming backstage afterwards to bask in her authentic protest prestige.
It looks back at her sensational life and career at the head of the protest culture and anti-Vietnam movement, and her relationship with Bob Dylan – with whom she was in love but who broke her heart. Her voice is incidentally in very good shape – more than we can say for Dylan’s ashy growl. We hear about her family’s Quakerism, the foundation of her social conscience and her marriage to anti-war protester David Harris, who was imprisoned for avoiding the draft leaving her pregnant. Oddly though, there is nothing about Steve Jobs, whom she also dated.
A sister, Mimi Fariña, followed Joan into music but was overshadowed. Another sister, Pauline, had no interest in music but was hardly less aware of Joan’s oppressive international celebrity. But throughout her success, and from her girlhood onward, Joan had stomach aches and panic attacks, with psychotherapy since her teens. Why? The movie reveals a huge archive of her tape-recorded therapy sessions, as well as what appear to be tape-recorded letters addressed to her father, the scientist Albert Baez, talking about recovered memories of abuse she suffered from those close to her. There is also a letter from her father, who says plaintively that these recovered memories are not true.
What memories, exactly? We see the boxes and boxes of tapes, some of which must have made it clear, but the film only hints obliquely at what Joan is talking about. And up to the closing credits and beyond, we can’t be absolutely sure we haven’t misunderstood the obvious implication. In some ways, it’s frustrating yet it’s also a rather haunting demonstration of how painful memories can follow us into old age, sometimes without ever quite coming into focus. It’s a shame that Baez has quit touring in some ways, when Mick Jagger and Paul McCartney are still plying their trade, but there is a quiet dignity in it too.
