Anonymous Club

Overview

With her song and record titles — her lyrics as well — Courtney Barnett has long found the words to express how many people feel. It's a knack, talent and gift, and it's helped her rocket to Australian fame and global success within a decade of releasing her debut EP in 2012. As thoughtful and captivating documentary Anonymous Club shows, it's also something she's frequently asked about in interviews. But expressing those lines and the emotions behind them with a guitar and microphone as weapons, plus a riotous melody as armour, is different to sharing them quietly one on one. Directed by her long-time collaborator Danny Cohen, who has helmed a number of her music videos, Anonymous Club begins with this reality. Barnett can pour her heart, soul and observations about life's chaos into the tunes that've made her a household name, achieving something that few others can; when she's on the spot, however, she's as uncertain and awkward as the rest of us.

Barnett's way with words and wordplay in her work, and her lack thereof elsewhere, thrums through Anonymous Club like a catchy riff. The subject doesn't fade, burrowing into the film as an earworm of a song inside a listener's head does, and feature first-timer Cohen doesn't want it to. His movie was shot over three years, starting in 2018, which places it between Barnett's second studio album and her third — and knowing that makes the phrases from their titles, and from her debut record also, echo with resonance throughout the doco. Anonymous Club could've been called Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit, like its subject's first album in 2015. Tell Me How You Really Feel from 2018 would've worked as well. And, yes, Things Take Time, Take Time would've been apt, too, concluding a line of thinking that the film invites anyway — ultimately finding its moniker in a Barnett track from 2014, before all those releases.

Across two tours spanning Europe, the US and Asia, plus stints in Melbourne, Anonymous Club watches Barnett sit and think, and sometimes just sit. It tasks the singer/songwriter with telling how she really feels, and shows her realising the truth that things take time. All of the above is captured on glorious 16-millimetre film and, even within a mere 83 minutes, the backstage documentary is overwhelming comprised of these ruminative, reflective moments — of snatches of Barnett's life caught as she hops between rooms that aren't her own, be it stages or green rooms or hotels or homes she's housesitting. Her thoughts and feelings come via brief chatter in front of the lens (or, more accurately, with the unseen Cohen behind it, shooting with a camera customised to record synchronised sound), and from overlaid snippets of the audio diary he asked her to keep. That's a job she tussles with — more words, more on-the-spot candour rather than deliberated-over lyrics, more struggles — but she still stuck at it for the project's duration.

Frank, earnest and honest, so much of what's uttered is as revelatory as everything that Barnett has sung over the years. She confides in the fly-on-the-wall film via her Dictaphone recordings; as a result, a highly poised, posed, image-conscious portrait, this isn't. "I don't know what the fuck I'm talking about anymore. I just feel like I'm going around in circles and digging myself a deeper hole," she says at one point, and many other statements have the same tone. Jumping from America to Japan to Germany and elsewhere, life on the road gets to her. Back in Australia, life without a fixed space to call her own after spending so long touring has a similar impact. "My heart is empty, my head is empty, the page is empty," she offers, another telling statement. "It feels like I'm being part of this scripted performance of what we think we're supposed to see on stage, and it just feels really pointless," she also advises.

There's raw feeling behind these words, and Cohen wouldn't have it any other way; Barnett uses her work to wittily and astutely contemplate everyday life, and he does the same with her rockstar existence in his doco. Of course, one of its insights, blatant as it proves, is how anti-rockstar the indie musician's day-to-day reality is. She gets excited about gold in her Berlin lodgings, her unassuming vibe has crowds mesmerised during her shows, and she needs prompting about lyrics when one fan asks her to sign his t-shirt with her own — but much of her days, as seen here, are a quiet, busy shuffle from place to place with swathes of downtime and alone time. Cohen and editor Ben Hall (another veteran of Barnett's videos) convey this in the movie's structure, too. The big-ticket parts of the tours — the gigs, travelling, and interviews with Jimmy Fallon and Ellen DeGeneres — whiz by, while the gap around them lingers.

Anonymous Club is a music documentary, but it isn't a concert movie. It knows where Barnett's career is at, the path she took to get there and how she's regarded, but it isn't a career overview or talking head-filled tribute. It features gig footage, but largely spliced into montages instead of as whole songs played on-stage. It thoroughly avoids other chattering figures — be it fellow musicians offering their praise, experts and commentators, or friends and family — in favour of its intimate, personal, in-the-room, inner monologue-driven approach. It's a road movie, but it's about the experience of being on tour over the tour itself or the places visited. Anonymous Club is about spending time and hanging out with Barnett, and about what it's like to be Barnett; melancholy, anxiousness, claustrophobia, doubt, fears, malaise and imposter syndrome come with the territory, relatably so.

Cohen isn't advising viewers that stars are people too, though. Again, this isn't that kind of message-pushing, persona-redefining doco. He makes it plain that this one figure is a person first and a famous musician second — and chronicles the process of constantly juggling and balancing the two, and the impact upon her mental health. His chosen aesthetic suits the job perfectly, playing like warm, soft, unprocessed memories, and also relishing blue shades in both pensive and hopeful moments. As its revealing journey is wrapping up, Barnett finds herself more in the second category, and has the words to explain it. "My albums won't be with me on my deathbed holding my hand," she notes. "This film will not be with us as we lie dying — but I'd like to think in the bigger scheme of things, it will live on and help other people, or inspire other people, or create some sort of conversation."