Hollywood’s long-promised, big-budget Janis Joplin biopic has been in the pipeline for what seems like 30 years now. And it never happens. I bet there’s been a Janis movie on the docket of one studio or another ever since the day she died in October 1970. The most recent projects have at one time or another attracted stars such as Amy Adams, Renée Zellweger and Zooey Deschanel. Pink has been slated to play her, as was the late, great Brittany Murphy at one time. Directors such as Catherine Hardwicke, Fernando Meirelles, Jean-Marc Vallée and Lee Daniels have been attached, only to pull out months or years later. In memory, she remains frozen in a kind of mish-mash of 1974 concert documentary Janis, Monterey pop festival and Woodstock footage, and parts of The Rose, with Bette Midler as Not-Janis.
So she remains today the least understood member of the Triple-J Club (Jimi, Janis, Jim); someone whose moment, which was brief and somehow perfect, makes less sense the further away it gets. However, for an intelligent portrait of her, head straight for Amy Berg’s superb new documentary Janis: Little Girl Blue, which incorporates revelatory interviews with family, friends, band members and associates (some long since dead), a good deal of stirring live and archive footage, and a lot of insight from people who knew her well.
It strikes a fine balance between the Janis we think we know – the strung-out psychedelic white-blues belter who roared out of Haight-Ashbury in 1967 and found instant stardom after slaying them at Monterey – and the other half of her. Namely the Texas teenager with the classic, boring, suburban 50s, Manson-girl childhood (smart, odd-duck kid, loving but distant parents) who – as she grew up – routinely found herself athwart her times, her place, her gender, her sexuality and all the conventional expectations of her, including the retrogressive race norms of her day. She defied and transcended those expectations in the grand manner, going from Port Arthur outcast to major San Francisco scene-insider in three years, but she still wrote home to her family every week and remained that yearning Port Arthur girl somewhere deep inside. Without that side of her, well filled out here by Berg, Janis Joplin almost wouldn’t make sense, and her music would likely lack that essential woundedness that animates it from within.
Best of all is the chance to reacquaint oneself not only with the real Janis – so naturally charming and funny (and a dream chatshow guest, as some Dick Cavett Show footage proves) – and her gigantic voice, but also with Janis the unexpectedly magnificent fashion icon, decked out in boas, tons of rings, big pink sunglasses, gold dresses, striped bellbottoms, the works. Style-wise, she was her own masterpiece. To quote a Facebook meme I spotted recently: “In a world of Kardashians, be a Janis!”
