Anonymous Club

Australia, 2021, 83’

“The antithesis of a rock biography,” announces the tagline of the film directed by Danny Cohen, synthesizing all that Anonymous Club isn’t. It isn’t trite, it isn’t classic, it isn’t repetitive. It is a music documentary radically different from the canon, as is Courtney Barnett, the Australian singer-songwriter and the film’s protagonist. The film director hands her a Dictaphone on which she can record at liberty her stream of consciousness, her impressions after a gruelling tour, characterized by the typical ‘bipolar’ progression. While the splendidly edited images of Barnett’s life-on-the-road flow by, the artist’s voice is both an accompaniment and a counterpoint, depending on the cases. A pure and uncontaminated testimony as well as an intimate journal that does not conceal anything of herself, including the more depressive moments such as the Berlin interlude of the tour that transforms into the emotional climax of the film. Anonymous Club is that rare object in which nothing – except the technical skill in making it – is fabricated: it is the faithful mirror of the clarity of a sui generis artist, for whom the reasons of the heart are indispensably interwoven with the creative process.