A genuinely moving and compelling document, released a couple of years back. Janis Joplin's story is one settled somewhere between pain, longing, the blues and a search for happiness and lasting freedom. . Onstage and off. Fame and lonelinessOh and heroin and booze. She didn't make it as we know all to well as we start the journey, but she still touched on moments of ecstasy that the rest of us will be lucky to ever experience.
The arc of her story is told with archive photos, concert footage and interviews from Janis herself and the other main players. Constantly return to an image of tracks shot from the back of a moving train, shifting from Sad Janis to Happy Janis and back again before she ran out of rail aged 27 in 1970 just as she'd kicked heroin, returning for one last hit, every junkie's great mistake.
The saddest irony of all is that she also seemed to have finally found love and achieved the musical grace she'd so long striven for with the recording of Pearl and particularly her version of Me & Bobby McGee which remains as somehow a definitive statement of her whole sad but memorable journey and its inherent contradictions. Well worth a watch.
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