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Her quest for success and love - you are free to see it as a result of early social ostracism, or poor body image - took her in and out of bands and relationships with good and bad companions. РІР‚СљI been lookinРІР‚в„ў around,РІР‚Сњ Joplin wrote home, РІР‚Сљand I noticed something - after you reach a certain level of talentРІР‚В¦ the deciding factor is ambition, or as I see it how much you really need, need to be loved, need to be proud of yourself.РІР‚Сњ (For a film about the РІР‚В60s, it is happily free both from nostalgia and cant.) ItРІР‚в„ўs left largely to Joplin herself - in letters read with just the right blend of pleading, insight and swagger by Chan Marshall, the artist also known as Cat Power - to describe that place and her progress through it. Though she frames Joplin within her times, Berg doesnРІР‚в„ўt idealize or demonize or even pause to explain them. (Offstage, male privilege maintained a warm space in the hippie commune.) It was mostly dudes onstage at Monterey Pop, where Joplin grabbed opportunity by the throat and submitted it to her will. You were more likely to be a singer, like Joplin, or Grace Slick in the Jefferson Airplane - the ice to JanisРІР‚в„ў fire in the popular formulation - holding a microphone, backed by men. There were other women in rock music when Joplin, a refugee from Port Arthur, Texas, joined Big Brother & the Holding Company in San Francisco in 1966 but you could not yet be a Carrie Brownstein or even a Belinda Carlisle. I donРІР‚в„ўt know that yet, all I got now is strength, but maybe if I keep singing, maybe IРІР‚в„ўll get it.РІР‚Сњ РІР‚СљBillie Holiday, Aretha Franklin,РІР‚Сњ Joplin says in an interview, РІР‚Сљthey are so subtle, they can milk you with two notes, they can go no farther than A to B, and they can make you feel like they told you the whole universeРІР‚В¦. She was, one might say to the young and unfamiliar, the Amy Winehouse of her generation: a white singer of black music, stylishly flamboyant, and dead at 27, who left behind a body of work recognized for its excellence and a future permanently composed of unrealized, unknowable potential. Just before the heroin overdose that led to her 1970 death in Los Angeles, she was in a good place creatively and professionally, finishing her fourth album, РІР‚СљPearl.РІР‚Сњ The tragedy of her life was how near it was to being other than tragic.

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But if the Joplin we see here can be sad and needy and drunk and drugged, she is also thoughtful, ambitious, wicked, smart, funny, vulnerable in a good as well as a bad way, doomed but also blessed to go her own way (РІР‚СљShe couldnРІР‚в„ўt figure out how to make herself like everybody else,РІР‚Сњ a childhood friend remembers), hopeful and talented. To call BergРІР‚в„ўs film cheerful is not to say that it takes a rosy view of a sometimes troubled life.

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РІР‚СљJanis: Little Girl BlueРІР‚Сњ comes to television Tuesday under the banner of the PBS series РІР‚СљAmerican Masters,РІР‚Сњ and rightfully so. Documentary filmmaker Amy Berg (РІР‚СљWest of Memphis,РІР‚Сњ РІР‚СљProphetРІР‚в„ўs PreyРІР‚Сњ) has made an elegant, affectionate and, in many ways, remarkably cheerful film about Janis Joplin - blues singer, bandleader, rock icon, feminist conundrum.

Janis joplin american masters