Janis: Lit­tle Girl Blue

As a young girl, I heard my moth­er scream­ing along to a tape record­ing of Janis Joplin’s ​‘Piece of My Heart’. It was shock­ing con­fir­ma­tion that a par­ent hadn’t con­signed emo­tions to a neat fil­ing cab­i­net labeled ​‘The Past’. I may as well have heard her hav­ing sex for all the yearn­ing those shrill notes revealed. From a child’s per­spec­tive it was pure embarrassment.

The pain of desire and the release of emot­ing was cen­tral to the singer Janis Joplin until she died from a hero­in over­dose at 27. Amy Berg’s doc­u­men­tary por­trait charts and con­tex­tu­alis­es her tumul­tuous time on earth while keep­ing the art of raw expres­sion as a key note. Joplin’s own words are a trail of bread­crumbs in the form of let­ters home to mid­dle-class Tex­an par­ents. Like a good girl, she kept them in the loop as she went from singing the blues on the fringes to the heart of ​’60s rock ​’n’ roll. Chan Mar­shall (aka Cat Pow­er) nar­rates extracts in her child­like south­ern tone. The words are earnest and evoke a more inno­cent time when hip­py terms like ​‘man’ and ​‘groovy’ could be spo­ken with­out invert­ed commas.

A tone of ten­der­ness and respect is main­tained across inter­views with fam­i­ly, friends, band mem­bers and lovers. All knew of her insa­tiable need to be loved. It was a force that under­pinned and loaded her career ambi­tions. A soft woman emerges. Her singing voice may have sound­ed like a soul cut by sand­pa­per, but her speak­ing voice was polite and gen­tle. Rolling Stone’s David Dal­ton described Janis as hav­ing: ​“Almost a Huck Finn inno­cence. The absolute woman-child ide­al of the Haight.”

The scene’s val­ues help us under­stand the woman who blos­somed out of it. We are giv­en a live­ly glimpse of a time when Haight-Ash­bury in San Fran­cis­co was the cen­tre of the once fet­ed, now dat­ed ideals of mind-expand­ing drug-tak­ing and free love. Drugs and sex were not last­ing enough for Joplin, and the film’s steady momen­tum reflects this – free­wheel­ing ener­gy is cor­ralled by con­crete events.

We are intro­duced to Janis grow­ing up as a social out­sider in Port Arthur, Texas. Her pain at being bul­lied and desire for accep­tance drove her ever onward: to Austin to sing the blues, home again to recov­er from meth addic­tion, to Cal­i­for­nia to join Big Broth­er and the Hold­ing Com­pa­ny, then star­dom at the Mon­terey fes­ti­val and rela­tion­ships with musi­cians. Her hero­in addic­tion is pre­sent­ed with a non-judg­men­tal sad­ness. Every­one knew she used. Every­one has a soul­ful the­o­ry as to why. We hear about her shoot­ing up while chat­ting with friends at the Chelsea Hotel. (Leonard Cohen wrote a song for her called ​‘Chelsea Hotel’.)

Music sourced from live per­for­mances, from on the road and in record­ing ses­sions punc­tu­ates every bio­graph­i­cal episode. Janis’ voice lasers through bull­shit leav­ing only some­thing quiv­er­ing and naked and real. The pri­mal heart pow­er­ing her singing eras­es time and puts me back in my child­hood home lis­ten­ing to my moth­er scream­ing the blues. Both women are now dead but the emo­tion behind the music will nev­er die. Amy Berg is a bold direc­tor to recog­nise and chan­nel intan­gi­ble feel­ings of long­ing in this apt, trag­ic and inspir­ing documentary.