A sweet, sad documentary about Janis Joplin

Janis Joplin sang as if jolted by electricity; her voice was a shriek, a rasp and a howl, wrapped in a raw nerve. Her life, too, was quick as a lightning bolt: Born in Port Arthur, Texas, in 1943, she shot to fame in her 20s, lived hard and died alone of a heroin overdose in a Los Angeles hotel at 27.

“Janis: Little Girl Blue,” from documentarian Amy Berg (“Deliver Us from Evil,” “West of Memphis”), tells that short story, interspersing concert footage with commentary from Joplin’s siblings, friends, lovers and fellow musicians, as well as voice-over readings of some of Joplin’s letters home. (A previous documentary, “Janis,” was released in 1974, consisting entirely of archival footage of Joplin.) What emerges is a sad, familiar story: an artist embraced by audiences, but never quite able to shake her own demons.

Early on, we learn, young Janis Lyn Joplin got kicked out of her high-school choir and, according to a childhood friend, “couldn’t figure out how to make herself like everybody else.” Unhappy and insecure (which wasn’t helped by a cruel prank that named her “Ugliest Man” in her campus newspaper), she turned to the blues and fled to California, where she found a community. Her gravel-on-lava performance of “Ball and Chain” at the Monterey Pop Festival (captured for posterity by documentarian D.A. Pennebaker), and her first big hit, “Piece of My Heart,” made her one of the biggest music stars of the late 1960s.

The playful, larger-than-life Joplin, whose smile was wide as a guitar, jumps off the screen here in archival footage — she had, as a friend recalled, “a Huck Finn innocence to her.” But you watch knowing that it’s fleeting, that a candle burnt at both ends won’t last the night. Smoothly told, with the sweetly vulnerable Joplin letters adding an additional layer of pathos, it’s a sad story that leaves us wondering what might have been. “She was,” a colleague mused, “a much better singer than the world, or even she, knew.”