Forty-five years after her death, Janis Joplin still doesn’t have a biopic of her meteoric rise to rock ‘n’ roll royalty. Part of the reason for this is that there are few actresses capable of capturing Joplin’s bawdy and vivacious spirit and, especially, her distinctively raspy, heart-baring vocals. Amy Adams has been rumored to take on the iconic role since 2010, but directorial changes and lawsuits haven’t allowed the project to get past the development phases. Meanwhile, producer Peter Newman, who has the rights to many of Joplin’s most famous songs, has spent the last 20 years trying to get a movie about the hard-living singer off the ground. But it’s a lot easier to endure the lack of a narrative film about Joplin when you’ve got a documentary as good as Amy Berg’s Janis: Little Girl Blue to take you directly to the source.
Thanks to a wealth of archival footage that includes live performances, backstage antics, personal letters and TV interviews of Joplin, Little Girl Blue is an immersive experience, one that focuses far more on the artist’s life than her untimely death. Berg digs deep into Joplin’s past, and we’re offered a chronological look at her rise from a socially awkward kid in Port Arthur, Texas to a blues maven in the Haight-Ashbury hippie scene of the late ‘60s to an outright rock legend. Despite her success, however, Joplin never seemed to shake the insecurity born out of an adolescence spent as a plain-faced outsider, and while she achieved transcendence through her music and a kind of intimacy with her audience, this film makes clear that it was the down hours after the stage lights dimmed that were never easy on her.
Berg builds her documentary on Joplin’s own words. The singer was extremely candid about her early life and her rise to stardom in the many filmed interviews she gave during her short career. Berg also pulls even deeper insight into Joplin’s inner world from letters she wrote to her relatively disapproving parents over the years. These letters are narrated by fellow Southern-born musician Chan Marshall (aka Cat Power), and her emotive voice-work gives life and urgency to these letters written nearly five decades ago. We also hear from those who knew Janis well, including two of her younger siblings and the surviving members of her breakthrough band, Big Brother and the Holding Company. We even get to hear from an elderly Dick Cavett (who also is often seen in archival interviews with Joplin on his show) as he smirks about how he may or may not have gone to bed with the legendary singer.
Though Janis: Little Girl Blue, doesn’t dwell on Joplin’s untimely death, her years-long struggle with heroin addiction and hard-drinking are chronicled in detail. Many of those who knew Janis in her famous years claim to have seen the writing on the wall. With many friends and musicians succumbing to overdoses, Joplin even addressed the possibility herself, telling a friend that she didn’t believe that drugs would kill her because she came from hardy pioneer stock. And Joplin’s death was especially tragic, given that by some accounts she’d largely sworn off heroin in the months leading up to her fatal overdose.
All in all, Little Girl Blue paints Joplin as a woman who embodied blues rock because she endured her fair share of darkness. She found freedom in her art, but all the highs she experienced made the lows that much more devastating. She harbored enough hurt from her high school years to return for her 10-year class reunion only then to lament in an interview that night that she had never been asked to prom. Perhaps it was this chip on her shoulder that propelled her to stardom and drove her to her excesses. Seeing her pal it up backstage with Jerry Garcia or perform at Woodstock drugged out of her mind, she was clearly a woman who lived hard and fast and had a great time doing it. But no amount of fame seemed to be enough to shield her from those lonely moments of feeling unloved.
