Joan Baez I Am a Noise (Albert Baez/Magnolia Pictures)

At the beginning of Joan Baez I Am a Noise, we hear a sonorous male voice murmuring soothing California-isms about reflection and memory. It’s…Joan Baez’s therapist, caught holding forth on tape. Though the biographical documentary of the iconic folk singer and social justice crusader starts with sympathetic candor, it may gone on to share too much.

“I want to be like Gandhi,” wrote singer Joan Baez in her mid-twenties. “I want to save the world.” Are these goals admirably idealistic or just slightly delusional? This profile offers up a lot of ambivalent moments like these. Baez admits she doesn’t always know if her public persona and the real Joan can fully detach from one another.

The film is mostly narrated by Baez herself, with the requisite talking heads filling out the rest. We see her embarking on a 2018-19 tour, flexing still-strong but aging vocal cords and knee joints. Home movies hark back to her childhood. It was a beautiful one, or certainly looked that way: Brilliant Mexican American physicist Albert Baez and Scottish wife Joan Sr. cavort for the camera with their lovely three daughters in gorgeously grainy 8mm. Everyone’s charming, happy, healthy.

Except young Joan showed signs of heavy anxiety early on. Bullied at school for her Mexican heritage, she began to compose poetry and songs—and to seek validation by performing. Fame hit the 18-year-old like a fireball. She was selling records, appearing on TV, and besotting journalists and audiences with her pristine good looks, passion, and sincerity. A Virgin Mary persona was imposed on the young folk singer, who jokes half-wryly that at one point she believed she was the Virgin Mary.

I Am a Noise unreels Baez’s 1960s political activism, with inspiring shots of her walking hand in hand with Martin Luther King Jr. and James Baldwin. It also opens up her doomed affair with Bob Dylan, both of them looking adorably young in stylish black-and-white. But the focus remains tightly on Baez and gradually reveals deep cracks in her psychological and emotional state.

Needless to say, the effect of mass adulation of Baez could be unhealthy. She candidly admits that she forges stronger bonds with audiences than in one-on-one relationships. The fallout from Baez’s stardom disrupted her family and sent her siblings into estrangement. According to Baez and the film, Baez’s winsome and talented sister Mimi Fariña rode out a short life in bitterness, jealously, and early widowhood. Baez and her son, Gabriel Harris, both allude to a stunted relationship that needed extensive repair after she spent the boy’s youth away on political crusades.

As if the family hasn’t been scarred enough, Baez reveals some terrible accusations she brought up late in life against family members. An audio clip of Baez’s therapist reprimanding her father in a long-ago family session makes for extremely painful listening. Baez goes into her psychological diagnoses, which include severe symptoms. Is showing so much a cathartic, necessary part of recovery? Or an overconcentration on (and overexposure of) one’s inner life?

I Am a Noise includes scenes of Baez greeting well-wishers after a concert, engaging in exchanging hugs, hand-holding, and making deep and empathetic eye contact. Very gracious of her, you think, but who needs this contact more? Joan Baez or her fans? The question is part of the mystery clinging to a figure who seems to have shared so many aspects of herself, but who can’t quite face who she really is.