Joan Baez, in Conversation with Jane Fonda

When Jane Fonda got on Zoom to interview Jane Baez earlier this month, she opened with a confession. In her twenties, Fonda told Baez, “I was totally obsessed with you.” In the summer of 1967, while Fonda was filming Barbarella in Rome, Baez strolled into the house Fonda and her then husband Roger Vadim were renting. “I was making gazpacho and you came in,” the actor recalls. “I was just gobsmacked.” Baez, the ethereal singer-songwriter and unflinching peace activist, has this effect on many people. But the comprehensive and at times unsettling new documentary, Joan Baez I Am a Noise, probes more deeply, beyond celebrity. Directed by Karen O’Connor, Miri Navasky and Maeve O’Boyle, with impressive access to Baez’s archives of drawings, journal entires, and a trove of meaningful relics in her late mother’s storage unit, the documentary finds Baez taking part in what she calls “the bone-shattering task of remembering”—remembering early racism, childhood abuse, an unloving father, and her experiences advocating for peace in Vietnam. Just before the film’s release by Magnolia Pictures, Baez and Fonda delved into it all, from lunch with Martin Luther King Jr. at his favorite restaurant in Mississippi to Baez’s passionate love affair with Bob Dylan—and much more.