Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Joan Baez: I Am A Noise’ on Hulu, A Deeply Personal Documentary About The Singer, Songwriter, And Activist For Social Justice

Joan Baez: I Am A Noise, now available on streaming platforms like Hulu, first premiered at the 73rd Berlin International Film Festival before making its domestic theatrical release in 2023. Directed and produced by Miri Navasky and Karen O’Connor, and directed and edited by Maeve O’Boyle, I Am A Noise features extensive interviews with Baez conducted during her 2019 farewell tour, as well as pieces of those live performances. But the doc is really a full life story, told with an abundance of personal reflection from the singer, songwriter, and Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award winner, whose family home movies and collection of diaries, letters, and audio recordings – including those from therapy sessions – combine with archival performance footage to reveal the multilevel scope of Baez’s personal and professional lives.   

JOAN BAEZ: I AM A NOISE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT? 

The Gist: “I don’t think anybody who gets famous at a young age has the slightest idea it’ll ever end.” In the contemporary interview portions of I Am a Noise, Joan Baez is 79 and preparing for her farewell tour, a tour that will roll through sold-out theaters across the US before hitting Europe for dates in Paris, Istanbul, and Madrid. And it’ll be a grind, which she readily acknowledges in segments where her legendary three-octave soprano and nimble guitar-playing fingers are raw from the effort. But she’s also been performing for a third of her life, basically famous since she first hit the stage at the Newport Folk Festival in 1959, and now her time as a performer is coming to a close. “The decision to end your career…I can’t really anticipate what it’s gonna be like.”    

I Am a Noise checks in on Baez as she sings and makes appearances on the tour, which also becomes an opportunity for some quality time/relationship rehabilitation with her son and occasional drummer Gabriel Harris. But the film is mostly a weighty personal document formed from the physical materials Baez retains in her precisely cataloged storage space. Her parents and two sisters appear in evocative home movies shot throughout her childhood and adolescence, stark diary entries and whimsical, effecting drawings are put in motion through animation, and letters Baez wrote become revealing highlights into her thought process, or even into her very soul.  

As Baez’s folk scene star rose, she promoted a fledgling Bob Dylan. (“He needed a mother; he needed somebody to sing his songs.”) She became active in the civil rights movement, and later went to jail to protest the war in Vietnam. But fame also pushed her away from her sisters, and twisted her lifelong struggles with anxiety into new and volatile forms. Together with her popular song “Virgin Mary,” Baez came to be referred to as the song’s namesake, or “Madonna.” And that was a head trip for a young woman who was always working to manage neuroses and panic attacks. “I went from thinking I was not very adequate to being called the Virgin Mary. I mean, that was a much better deal. So I went running around barefoot with long hair looking like the Virgin Mary, probably thinking a little bit that I was.” Career highs – and later, lots of getting high, mostly on quaaludes – are chronicled in I Am a Noise, which finds its nadir with audio tape of individual and family therapy sessions that attempted to sort out where all the internal and emotional strife in Baez’s life really began.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of? D.A. Pennebaker’s evocative 1967 documentary film Don’t Look Back, which chronicled a cocky young hotshot named Bob Dylan as he toured England in 1965, is on Max and well worth a stream. (Baez accompanied and performed with Dylan on the tour, the relationship fallout of which is discussed in I Am A Noise.) And in 2009 the PBS series American Masters produced Joan Baez: How Sweet the Sound, the first extensive documentary film of the singer, which included an on-camera reunion/interview with her ex-husband David Harris.   

Performance Worth Watching: The editing in I Am A Noise, by co-director Maeve O’Boyle, acts as a powerful channel into Joan Baez’s story. With 60 years of live performance to cover, as well as the multiple chapters of Baez’s life – her upbringing, at times difficult relationships with her sisters and parents, emergence as a fierce advocate for social justice, and experiences as a wife and mother – you could say there’s a lot to cover. But O’Boyle’s work aligns these segments with reverence and grace, and often draws interesting parallels with the use of Baez’s personal archive of diaries, letters, and artwork.    

Memorable Dialogue: “I was a sensitive kid,” Joan Baez says in the present over animated images from her adolescence. “I internalized everything. I worried about the poor, I worried about animals.” Foreshadowing her public life as a folk singer and advocate, she says that even back then, “I was aware that there were sorrows greater than mine.”

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: With Nora Dunn playing her on the memorable 1986 Saturday Night Live sketch “Make Joan Baez Laugh” – maybe all anyone needs is Phil Hartman as a goofy game show host and Jon Lovitz as Howie Mandel, inflating a rubber glove with his nostrils – it’s easy to see how the singer’s bracing folk songs and staunch advocacy had defined her by a certain point in her career. But in another way, Joan Baez has never felt the need to apologize. “By the time I was in tenth grade,” she writes in a letter featured in the documentary, “I had an identity. I am not a saint. I am a noise.” Through these letters and accompanying artwork, we learn how Baez’s identity was shaped, and with the addition of archival material from her performances throughout the 1960s, we can connect that directly to who she became as a professional. I Am a Noise is at its best when it becomes elliptical, with the electrons of folk music, fame, audacious activism, and the realization of Baez’s self as someone who requires individual space revolving around the core nucleus of her upbringing. And hey, it’s not like she never cracked a smile. One of the coolest pieces of old footage here features the singer onstage in the 1960s. “I’ll do Bobby Dylan” – Bobby! – “doing Joan Baez,” and the audience cuts up as she sings the traditional ballad “Mary Hamilton” in a reedy, spot-on impersonation of Dylan.

Our Call: Stream It. Joan Baez: I Am a Noise will serve old and new fans of the singer alike with its wide range of archival materials, as well as bits of live performance. But ultimately this is documentary filmmaking as personal journey, a life story told with full visual immersion for the viewer.  

Johnny Loftus (@glennganges) is an independent writer and editor living at large in Chicagoland. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, All Music Guide, Pitchfork Media, and Nicki Swift.