Janis Ian doc offers conventional account of an unconventional artist

Washington Post

04-04-2025

'Janis Ian: Breaking Silence' is so close to being a great documentary that its easily remedied flaws are all the more vexing.
Director Varda Bar-Kar ('Fandango at the Wall') offers a conventional but still compelling synopsis of the iconoclastic singer-songwriter's long career, from her seminal 1960s hit 'Society's Child' to her heartbreaking cancellation of a planned 2022 farewell tour after vocal scarring left her unable to sing. Bar-Kar's mix of present-day talking heads with archival interviews and performance footage of Ian from (mostly) the 1960s and '70s isn't innovative, but it gives us the fundamentals of Ian's artistic and personal struggles from the mouths of the people who experienced or witnessed them.
There's no question the artist born Janis Fink warrants the veneration: The daughter of a New Jersey chicken farmer, she was all of 12 years old when she sent her composition 'Hair of Spun Gold,' which she'd written at summer camp, to the folk music magazine Broadside, which published the song. That got her invited to play a 'hootenanny' at the storied Greenwich Village club the Village Gate, as part of a lineup that included Phil Ochs and Tom Paxton.
She was 14 when her song 'Society's Child' addressed the subject of interracial romance. A double-digit number of labels declined to release it before Verve Records, the home of jazz greats and avant-garde weirdos the Velvet Underground, agreed to put it out. Not until Leonard Bernstein invited Ian to perform and discuss the song on a 1967 TV special did the tune become a hit. In Bar-Kar's documentary, Ian recalls that producer George 'Shadow' Morton told her he could guarantee 'Society's Child' would top the charts if she agreed to replace the lyric about a suitor's face 'shining black as night' with something more anodyne. But even at that tender age, Ian understood the importance of sticking to her principles. The line stayed.
Bar-Kar had enviable access to her subject and to many of Ian's collaborators, romantic partners, chroniclers and interlocutors. Influential critics Ann Powers, Anthony DeCurtis and Stephen Holden praise her originality and fearlessness. Fellow folkies Joan Baez and Arlo Guthrie admire her craft. Janey Street, a singer-songwriter who met Ian at the summer camp where Ian wrote her first songs and has remained close with her since, is here, as is Ian's first love, photographer Peter Cunningham — who remained friendly with the singer even after she left him for a woman who would, in turn, leave her for Ian's drummer. The course of true love never did run smooth.
Nor did the course of music biz careers, which for Ian included struggles with depression and substance abuse, and an unnamed business manager whose book cooking left Ian deeply in debt to the IRS for unpaid taxes. Before coming out in the early 1990s — after being accused of being a lesbian in the 1960s by that self-appointed guardian of public morality Bill Cosby, and then outed in a 1975 Village Voice piece by Cliff Jahr — she endured an abusive five-year marriage to Portuguese filmmaker Tino Sargo, who she says once held her at gunpoint for hours. It was the last time she'd ever be in a room with him. In 2003, Ian and her longtime partner Patricia Snyder would marry in Canada, becoming the first lesbian couple featured in the New York Times' 'Vows' column.
One of the film's most entertaining talking heads is producer Brooks Arthur, who engineered 'Society's Child' and appears to have sat for several interviews before his death at 86 in October 2022. Of his decision to reteam with Ian for her 1974 album 'Stars,' several years after Ian had withdrawn from the limelight, Arthur says, 'We did groove back then, and there was no reason in the world we couldn't groove again.'
Other guests appear seemingly just because Bar-Kar could get them: Actor Laurie Metcalf and comedian Lily Tomlin — who presented Ian with her Grammy Award for 1975's 'Between the Lines' — drop in to pay their respects, though neither contributes much. You know who does? 'Hacks' star Jean Smart, who reflects that she identified with the clear-skinned 'beauty queen' referenced in Ian's immortal ballad 'At Seventeen' rather than the awkward 'ugly duckling girls like me' that described the self-image of so many listeners. Ian made even the bullies feel seen.
Given Bar-Kar's focus on a handful of standout Ian songs — 'Society's Child,' 'Stars,' 'At Seventeen,' 'Flying Too High' — it would be nice if the film gave us a full, uninterrupted performance of even one of them. But we see Ian play only in too-brief snippets, and the same goes for when we see other stars — Roberta Flack, Mel Tormé, Celine Dion — perform her compositions. (We get a glimpse of Nina Simone's epic interpretation of 'Stars' from the 1976 Montreux Jazz Festival, and the performance has been released commercially, but the clip is still worth watching in its 7½-minute entirety.)
'Breaking Silence' goes awry only when it indulges in a wrongheaded attempt to liven things up visually. 'This film depicts events from Janice Ian's life as imagined by the director for a richer audience experience,' a title card included in the end credits advises. But these soft-focus, slow-mo reenactments — where actors representing the years-ago versions of Ian and her confederates mime a scene as we hear the present-day Ian recount it — are the most imagination-deficient element of what is otherwise an insightful biography of an exacting singer-songwriter whose achievements have been, um, undersung.
There's no 'ecstatic truth' revealed by these Investigation Discovery-grade pantomimes, just a surfeit of taste. Anyway, Ian's songs offer all the truth we need.
Unrated. At AFI Silver Theatre. Contains non-explicit discussion of sex, drugs and rock-and-roll. 114 minutes.