JANIS IAN: BREAKING SILENCE (B+) - I've led a fairly charmed life, free from trauma or even much struggle. But one of the toughest years of my life fell during the lonely existence of junior year of high school -- brooding over how long it would take before I kissed a girl or had a close friend. At 17.
I was a sucker in the 1970s for sensitive singer-songwriters, like Jim Croce and Paul Simon. And I learned from watching this documentary about their cohort Janis Ian that her most famous song can still feel like a sock in the gut, stirring feelings that to this day bring a tear to my eye -- "At Seventeen." As one talking head here observes, just about any one of us has moments of darkness and doubt. No song has captured that human vulnerability like Ian's 1975 smash. It was from "At Seventeen" that I learned the truth.
I watched her perform it on the first episode of "Saturday Night Live," when I was about 13. and it hit home four years later, an anthem for social outcasts. But Ian, of course, was much more than that one song.
She was an accomplished songwriter in her early teens, and had a hit in 1966 at 15 with "Society's Child," a sophisticated song about race relations ("She called you 'boy' instead of your name"). And this documentary certainly allows her story to unfold, mostly through archival footage and narration by Ian, now in her 70s, who is mostly hear and not seen in present form. We also visit with talking heads, including contemporaries Joan Baez, Lily Tomlin and Arlo Guthrie; fans like actors Laurie Metcalf and Jean Smart; and fatherly former producers, George "Shadow" Martin and Brooks Arthur, all of whom put Ian's long career in perspective.
Ian comes off as a dynamo and a survivor during her various life cycles and musical phases (which, unfortunately, included a disco-era collaboration with Giorgio Moroder). Her first adult relationship was with a willowy woman who broke her heart. She would then marry an abusive alcoholic, a brute who once held her at gunpoint, before late in life finding her true life partner. Her longtime accountant left her broke in the 1980s and in debt to the IRS. She eventually reinvented herself by moving to Nashville, where she rediscovered the roots of songwriting and collaboration, penning hits for others.
Throughout, her deeply personal compositions -- she would have a career revival and fully come out of the closet in 1992 with her dark, layered album "Breaking Silence -- provide the through-line from teenager to senior citizen. (She had to cut short a farewell tour a few years ago when she lost her singing voice.) There are joyful stories throughout. She recalls getting upstaged in the late '70s, at her peak, by her opening act, an up-and-coming Billy Joel, after which she vowed never to phone in a performance again.
The main problem with the movie is the oppressive use of re-enactments. Director Varda Bar-Kar, who styles herself as an "activist" filmmaker, assembles an entire cast of players to portray Ian and others throughout her life, and at least half the movie involves scenes scuffed up to resemble archival footage. It is amateurish and distracting. It almost ruined the film for me at several points. It was only the power of the songs and the charming tenacity of Ian that got me through the nearly two-hour running time.
The re-enactments are especially annoying because we rarely get to view a contemporary Ian -- only at the very beginning and very end. Otherwise, she is the unseen narrator. Maybe that was Ian's choice -- why distract from the story being told with repeated visuals of a 70-something white-haired woman. I'm not a fan of biopics, especially of musicians, but Bar-Kar certainly had the material that would justify scrapping the documentary and going full tilt into historical fiction; instead, she slaps together a mixture and does neither genre justice. (She also has a curious habit of pulling back from her talking-head interviews to show the microphones, cameras and fake backgrounds, taking the viewer out of the moment.)
It is to Ian's credit that her life story weathers this artistic assault. She displays a knack for withstanding life's challenges and making a meaningful impact with her music decade after decade. It unmoors her from the gritty '70s -- and those ugly-duckling teen years -- and fleshes out her catalog. In the end, she is the star of her own biopic.
BONUS TRACKS
Ian's breakthrough, at age 15, "Society's Child," got the stamp of approval on TV from Leonard Bernstein:
She was influenced by English folk songs, in the era of Fairport Convention. An example is "Tea and Sympathy":
Ian wrote "Stars," which we previously featured in this review of a documentary about Nina Simone, after being inspired by Don McLean's "Vincent," one of those perfect compositions:
"Stars" plays over the closing credits, in a version by Bettye Lavette, but I couldn't find a version online.
Ian always had a jazzy side to her. Here's is a duet with Mel Torme on her song "Silly Habits"
Here is a song Ian wrote for a Nashville waitress who thought her average life didn't have an impact on the world. It is the lovely "Some People's Lives" (which Bette Midler covered as the title track to her 1990 album):