Critics reviews

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.

Here [Berg] largely conforms to biopic convention – despite citing Darren Aronofsky's 2000 film Requiem for a Dream as a (not readily detectable) visual influence. Little Girl Blue sticks to a familiar formula of archive footage, photographs and documents, with reminiscences from Joplin's family, friends and fellow musicians. There's even a three-act structure: Janis growing up, Janis in a bad, Janis goes solo. It's in the fact act that image becomes a keynote.

Though sluggish in the middle section, the film is nonetheless effective in illustrating how a star as incendiary as Joplin could dim and ultimately die in the spotlight; one acute example is a newspaper clipping from her personal collection that describes her songs as "raw and desperate mating calls"—a backhanded compliment, like so many directed toward her music and physical appearance, that still smarts.

Berg is an honestly partisan filmmaker of social issue documentaries (Deliver Us From Evil and West of Memphis); Janis has an analytical edge, but it's also a celebration that refuses to bog down Joplin down in her sad adolescence, her troubles with love, or the booze and heroin habit that brought about her lonely 1971 death in a motel at age 27.

What [the film has] going for it is some of the most fiery rock performances ever captured on film... Far too few posthumous music docs delve into the particulars of what made the greats great, because they're too busy dwelling on the decadence. But Berg has plenty of actual analysis and appreciation here, showing how Joplin applied her love of the blues and her raspy howl to the untamed sounds coming out of Haight-Ashbury, creating a style that the pop establishment had to take seriously.

It's poignant to see all the now-elderly people who knew Joplin in her prime, during the hairy, trippy glory days of the late 1960s. As a Texas teenager, Joplin was tormented for her rough looks. Berg subtly shows that Joplin, her voice and personality ablaze, in fact was a stunning woman... The movie doesn't rise above its music-doc formula of photo, clip, talking head. But for fans — like me — it's a heartfelt, engrossing tribute.

Amy Berg's Janis: Little Girl Blue subtly brings Janis Joplin back to life, allowing the viewer to vicariously engage with her as a human being first and a legendary voice in American music second. This is a significant accomplishment, as most biographic documentaries emphasize their subjects' iconography at the price of distancing them from the audience, corralling them retrospectively into a pat bracket reserved for Great People.

Berg wisely charts Joplin's emotional developments in tandem with her professional ones, which creates a well-rounded picture of Joplin. Unfortunately, this kind of intimate picture fails to account for Joplin's importance as a musician, despite the film contextualizing the revolutionary cultural milieu Joplin and her band, Big Brother and the Holding Company, found themselves in.

From her sensational rendition of Ball and Chain at Monterey Pop to footage from her 1970 high school reunion and recollections of her string of painful relationship break-ups, the doc shows many sides of this complex and original woman.

Berg, smartly, has enlisted Chan Marshall to read Joplin's letters home to her family in Port Arthur, Texas: These dispatches are so sensible, so perceptive and straightforward, that they offer a hint that Joplin might have eventually pulled it together and survived. The fact that she didn't is heartbreaking no matter how you feel about Joplin's music.

Boasting equivalent depth of research, extensive access to an intimate personal archive, and a selection of galvanizing performance footage, Berg's film is no stylistic innovator itself, but it's the satisfying feature-length overview that Joplin's brief, fiercely brilliant career has long merited.