AVClub: This past summer, Asif Kapadia’s documentary Amy served as a kind of “What happened?” postmortem for anyone looking to understand how fame, drugs, emotional damage, and tabloid shamelessness conspired to kill an uncommonly talented woman at age 27. And now here comes the prequel. Amy Berg’s Janis: Little Girl Blue is about another R&B-loving force of nature who died at 27, consumed by her addictions and by the intense demands on her time. Berg doesn’t have the wealth of Janis Joplin footage or previously unheard music that Kapadia had for Amy Winehouse. But it’s remarkable how similar the two movies are, in terms of the stories they tell about women who came from hard circumstances and developed public images that were hard to live up to. It’s almost like there’s something archetypal about the rise and fall of a certain kind of rock star.
EW: Death is excellent at turning artists into icons, but it tends to calcify them, too—recasting messy, complicated humans as the familiar demigods of dorm-room posters and greatest-hits collections. Janis: Little Girl Blue is the latest documentary this year, after memorable takes on Kurt Cobain, Amy Winehouse, and Nina Simone, to restore some of what gets lost in the process of mythmaking.
Variety: Without Janis Joplin, there mightn’t have been an Amy Winehouse. The two most prominent female members of the so-called “27 Club” may have worked in different musical registers (while both appropriating a heavy dose of soul), but it was Joplin who blazed a trail for female artists like Winehouse to defy industry standards of appearance, performance and behavior. So it feels like a breach of historical order that Amy Berg’s thoroughly absorbing documentary “Janis: Little Girl Blue” arrives on the heels of Asif Kapadia’s comparable “Amy.” 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. This PBS American Masters entry will take a piece of many a boomer’s heart, especially in ancillary.
