Director Amy Berg has taken on Hollywood sex abuse, the West Memphis drama, scandals involving Catholic Church as well as Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, but for her next project, she will be rocking out. While the story of the late Janis Joplin is ultimately a tragic one, Janis: Little Girl Blue takes a deep look at her music that touched the world. Following screenings at Venice, TIFF, and more, it’ll now come to theaters next month and we have the first trailer.
We said in our review out of Venice, “Credit to the director, Joplin’s latter years are handled with a tremendous degree of delicacy. Neither drugs nor death are exploited for cheap emotional response. The tragedy is laid out evidently and clear. Up until this point you could have played Janis and Kapadia’s Amy side-by-side and found little narrative difference. Fame took its pound of flesh from Joplin of course, but the two women lived in very different worlds. Free from any sort of comparable media attention, Janis enjoys a trip to Rio to get clean. She succeeds for the time being, even finding a lover, and generally looks to be managing quite well. She breaks from the band and finds a new creative freedom. Of course the whims of the gods can be brutal, as we soon learn.”
Check out the trailer below.
Janis Joplin is one of the most revered and iconic rock & roll singers of all time, a tragic and misunderstood figure who thrilled millions of listeners and blazed new creative trails before her death in 1971 at age 27. With “Janis: Little Girl Blue,” Oscar-nominated director Amy Berg (“Deliver Us from Evil,” “West of Memphis”) examines Joplin’s story in depth for the first time on film, presenting an intimate and insightful portrait of a complicated, driven, often beleaguered artist. Joplin’s own words tell much of the film’s story through a series of letters she wrote to her parents over the years, many of them made public here for the first time (and read by Southern-born indie rock star/actor Chan Marshall, also known as Cat Power). Joplin was a powerhouse when she sang, and her meteoric rise and untimely demise changed music forever.
Janis: Little Girl Blue opens on November 27th in theaters and will air on PBS likely next year.