With Asif Kapadia’s Amy poised to scoop up awards, this is an appropriate time to watch Amy Berg’s eye-opening documentary about Janis Joplin, the singer-songwriter who died of a heroin overdose in 1970 at the age of 27.

Joplin was making it in the psychedelic 60s, which promoted very conventional attitudes in the white rock-and-pop mainstream about male heroes and demurely attractive women. She emerges here as a raw and uncompromising talent; her voice tends towards a gravelly roar of rage and need. We are used to the paradox of white women singers “sounding black” as they give voice to their pain, and Joplin was a pioneer.

She endured horrendous treatment from the reactionary bullies in her Texas high school. Incredibly, she showed up at the 10-year reunion with TV cameras – which capture all her anxiety and need for retrospective validation and victory over the past.

What this movie introduces us to, indirectly, is the possibility that self-destruction is a genre in art and in life, requiring two addictions: to applause (causing agonising cold-turkey after the show) as well as to drugs. Joplin was a heroin user most of her adult life, and perhaps this is so powerful that it obliterates all personalities and defies all analysis. Or perhaps it is a symptom of the celebrity hunger or social dysfunction that John Lennon says was the real problem, in a Dick Cavett TV interview about Joplin, shown here.

A brief, fierce life.