Doc Stories 2024: "Janis: Little Girl Blue"

Image courtesy SFFILM

It isn't every day that I sit in a theater watching a movie and realize that the hair on my arms is standing up.

OK, OK, I'm not gonna pretend that we're the same person. But! I will say that I relate to Janis Joplin on many levels ... mostly the "born in Texas/ostracized in school/found people in Austin/found myself in San Francisco" level.

I didn't really know the Janis Joplin story before seeing Amy Berg's 2015 documentary Janis: Little Girl Blue. When I got this year's Doc Stories program, this movie caught my eye for that reason (that, and it turned out to be the first movie of the film festival). I knew I had to see this film.

Of course, there are myriad ways that Janis and I are not alike. Fort Worth isn't Port Arthur. The 1980s are not the 1950s. And most importantly—I'm not a woman and I've never really suffered from depression or drug addiction. But Amy Berg's documentary does enough to humanize Joplin that the departures from my own similar experiences and hers elicit empathy.

Over the course of the movie, I came to feel like Janis was a friend. I imagined both myself living back then or her being a contemporary of mine in the Eighties, and it felt natural as hell that we'd hang, in some alternate universe. Maybe that was always sitting there waiting for me to discover. Maybe. I like to give the director and editor credit, also, though.

There's also hella SF/Bay Area in this movie. Duh.

And you know how some movies, you know how they're gonna end. Or a book, a story, whatever. You know what's coming and think you're prepared. Then it happens, and it knocks you on your ass. Someone was definitely cutting onions at The Vogue toward the end of this film.