Review: Beyond the tragedy, ‘Janis: Little Girl Blue’ reveals Joplin as a smart, funny, vulnerable feminist conundrum

Documentary filmmaker Amy Berg (“West of Memphis,” “Prophet’s Prey”) has made an elegant, affectionate and, in many ways, remarkably cheerful film about Janis Joplin -- blues singer, bandleader, rock icon, feminist conundrum. “Janis: Little Girl Blue” comes to television Tuesday under the banner of the PBS series “American Masters,” and rightfully so.

To call Berg’s film cheerful is not to say that it takes a rosy view of a sometimes troubled life. But if the Joplin we see here can be sad and needy and drunk and drugged, she is also thoughtful, ambitious, wicked, smart, funny, vulnerable in a good as well as a bad way, doomed but also blessed to go her own way (“She couldn’t figure out how to make herself like everybody else,” a childhood friend remembers), hopeful and talented. Just before the heroin overdose that led to her 1970 death in Los Angeles, she was in a good place creatively and professionally, finishing her fourth album, “Pearl.” The tragedy of her life was how near it was to being other than tragic.

She was, one might say to the young and unfamiliar, the Amy Winehouse of her generation: a white singer of black music, stylishly flamboyant, and dead at 27, who left behind a body of work recognized for its excellence and a future permanently composed of unrealized, unknowable potential.

“Billie Holiday, Aretha Franklin,” Joplin says in an interview, “they are so subtle, they can milk you with two notes, they can go no farther than A to B, and they can make you feel like they told you the whole universe…. I don’t know that yet, all I got now is strength, but maybe if I keep singing, maybe I’ll get it.”

There were other women in rock music when Joplin, a refugee from Port Arthur, Texas, joined Big Brother & the Holding Company in San Francisco in 1966; but you could not yet be a Carrie Brownstein or even a Belinda Carlisle. You were more likely to be a singer, like Joplin, or Grace Slick in the Jefferson Airplane -- the ice to Janis’ fire in the popular formulation -- holding a microphone, backed by men. It was mostly dudes onstage at Monterey Pop, where Joplin grabbed opportunity by the throat and submitted it to her will. (Offstage, male privilege maintained a warm space in the hippie commune.)

Though she frames Joplin within her times, Berg doesn’t idealize or demonize or even pause to explain them. (For a film about the ‘60s, it is happily free both from nostalgia and cant.) It’s left largely to Joplin herself -- in letters read with just the right blend of pleading, insight and swagger by Chan Marshall, the artist also known as Cat Power -- to describe that place and her progress through it.

“I been lookin’ around,” Joplin wrote home, “and I noticed something -- after you reach a certain level of talent… the deciding factor is ambition, or as I see it how much you really need, need to be loved, need to be proud of yourself.”

Her quest for success and love -- you are free to see it as a result of early social ostracism, or poor body image -- took her in and out of bands and relationships with good and bad companions. (Berg’s great find, if that’s the word, is David Niehaus, who met Joplin on the beach in Rio de Janeiro – she had gone off alone in a way that is impossible in the present mediascape -- helped her kick heroin, for the moment, and became a traveling companion and boyfriend.) We see her in the studio and, of course, onstage, living the moment, brow knit in an embodiment of her blues. Gray-haired old bandmates and associates, friends and lovers pitch in with reminiscences, offering the long view that Joplin herself would only ever imagine.

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‘American Masters: Janis: Little Girl Blue’

Where: KOCE
When: 8 p.m. Tuesday
Rating: TV-14-L (may be unsuitable for children under the age of 14 with an advisory for coarse language)

robert.lloyd@latimes.com

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American Masters (TV14-L) (cc) Janis: Little Girl Blue Rock singer Janis Joplin’s life is explored through letters and previously unseen footage. (s) (N)}