I Am Woman

This light­weight biopic of singer and fem­i­nist icon Helen Red­dy, which cov­ers rough­ly 20 years of her life, is buoyed by a com­pelling and nuanced cen­tral per­for­mance from Til­da Cobham-Hervey.

It starts with her move to Amer­i­ca in 1966 fol­low­ing a win on Aus­tralian pop music TV show Band­stand, the prize being a trip to record a sin­gle with Mer­cury records in New York City. When she arrives, the first in a series of patro­n­is­ing, sleazy record exec­u­tives reneges on the deal and Red­dy is cast asun­der into a neo-noir land­scape. The film is stylised to with­in an inch of its life: the homes, the hair­cuts and over­sized col­lars all have an almost oth­er­world­ly elegance.

The pol­ish on screen extends to the film’s depic­tion of abject pover­ty, with Helen and her infant daughter’s des­ti­tu­tion nev­er real­ly expressed beyond jokes about tinned spaghet­ti. Her friend­ship with music jour­nal­ist Lil­lian Rox­on (Danielle Mac­don­ald) is the film’s most com­pelling rela­tion­ship, and the actors have an easy and warm chem­istry even when lum­bered screen­writer Emma Jensen’s clunky, expo­si­tion heavy dialogue.

Far­ing less well is her rela­tion­ship with her boyfriend and even­tu­al man­ag­er and hus­band Jeff Wald (Evan Peters) who seems to be in an entire­ly dif­fer­ent film than the rest of the cast. While Cob­ham-Har­vey brings a thought­ful­ness and poise to her turn, Peters goes for unhinged histri­on­ics and seems to be chan­nel­ing the feel­ing of being on copi­ous amounts of cocaine long before the film intro­duces drug addic­tion as a plot point.

We fol­low Red­dy and Wald from the glis­ten­ing jew­el tones of New York to the bleached-out pas­tels of Cal­i­for­nia where her mete­oric rise to star­dom begins. Despite the relent­less chau­vin­ism of every record exec­u­tive she encoun­ters, she even­tu­al­ly writes the film’s epony­mous fem­i­nist anthem ​‘I Am Woman’. Mon­tages of the women’s lib­er­a­tion move­ment set to the song are irre­sistible – the sim­plic­i­ty of the mes­sage makes it all the more powerful.

Direc­tor Unjoo Moon does tend to over-sign­post all of the film’s twists and turns to dead­en­ing effect and the film’s glossy sheen at times extends to Red­dy her­self. It deter­mined­ly sanc­ti­fies her as fault­less­ly kind, noble and tal­ent­ed, her only flaw being to occa­sion­al­ly trust the wrong peo­ple. In the third act this becomes increas­ing­ly incon­gru­ous and under­mines Cobham-Hervey’s oth­er­wise three-dimen­sion­al characterisation.

The film pur­ports to be a fem­i­nist endeav­our, yet at times it reduces Reddy’s lega­cy to, ​“nice woman mar­ries bad man”. Despite all this, it remains an endear­ing trib­ute to the recent­ly passed singer. On this evi­dence, she was a bold, defi­ant woman who penned hit after hit and defied an indus­try that dis­missed her work as insub­stan­tial ​“house­wife rock”. The pow­er of her music and the endur­ing strug­gle of women makes the film res­onate beyond its for­mu­la­ic surface.