#Janis joplin movie free#

There’s an astounding clip in which she goes back, as a rock star, to her high school reunion, and when talking to a reporter she still can’t get past the pain.” Growing up in a parochial Texas town in the 1950s, the teenage Joplin was ridiculed for her looks, and there was nothing romantic about her ‘outcast’ status.

#Janis joplin movie free#

In Little Girl Blue, Berg brings off something comparable: she employs a vast array of early photographs, and also entries from Joplin’s diary (read by the musician Cat Power), to create an intimate portrait of Janis the unruly free spirit. The recent Kurt Cobain documentary Montage of Heck was a head-spinning immersion in Cobain’s notebooks, youthful drawings, and home videos, and Amy, this year’s hit Amy Winehouse doc, used a treasure trove of private video footage to transcend the beehive and cat’s-eye mascara, making it feel, amazingly, like you’d never seen (or heard) Amy Winehouse before. In an age when the lives of pop stars are so relentlessly on display, documentary filmmakers are devising new ways to dive deep into the kind of archival material that would normally fuel an exhaustive written biography. Berg interviews Cavett, who is hilariously coy about whether he and Joplin ever slept together, but it’s clear that these two had more in common than the culture could see or handle. Maybe that’s why she got along so famously with Dick Cavett, the talk-show host who turned Janis’ guest appearances into unlikely flirt-a-thons. At the same time she could be intensely joyful and one of the film’s revelations is that Janis the dissolute hippie, wrapping herself in feather boas and talking in ‘60s jive, was an artificial creation: a cover-up for the sophisticated, quietly articulate woman she really was. The film suggests that there was a sadness – a self-hatred – that shadowed Janis Joplin. It’s only 92 minutes long, but it draws the audience into a magisterial biography it’s electric, intimate and heartbreaking. Janis: Little Girl Blue, directed by Amy Berg (the documentarian behind West of Memphis and Deliver Us From Evil), is that kind of movie. But there’s a special, rich, satisfying pleasure that comes of seeing a doc about someone you feel you know almost too well, and by the end the film has brought you so close to her that in your imagination, she’s been reborn. It can be thrilling to see a great documentary on a subject you know nothing about.