I Am Woman: Helen Reddy Biopic Captures the Big Picture, Misses the Crucial Minutiae

By Liam Lacey

Rating: C+

Australian pop singer Helen Reddy’s warm, nasal alto gave a memorable edge to more than a dozen top-40 soft rock hits through the 1970s. That was the era that also belonged to everyone from Elton John and Anne Murray, Cat Stephens, James Taylor, Bread and The Carpenters.

In a brief period of a half-dozen years, Reddy had her own television, show, won music awards and, through her best-selling 1971 anthem, “I Am Woman,” captured the gusto of second-wave feminism. Her performance in Los Angeles at the 2017 Women’s March following the election of Donald Trump brought her name — and the song — back to public attention.

Her career gets the movie-of-the-week bio treatment in I Am Woman, the first feature by director Unjoo Moon from a screenplay by Emma Jensen (Mary Shelley). Star Tilda Cobham-Hervey captures some of Reddy’s lanky physicality and jaunty, power-flirt performance style, while off-screen scenes emphasize her watchful reserve.

Read our interview with Tilda Cobham-Hervey

Her long journey, and triumph over a gauntlet of patronizing music industry males, starts in 1966, when the newly divorced Reddy, in her mid-twenties, arrived in New York City with her three-year-old daughter.
She has come from her native Australia after winning a recording contract with Mercury Records but upon arrival, an executive tells her the deal is off. Boy bands are where it’s at.

Determined to make it in America, Reddy moves into a cockroach-infested hotel, singing cover tunes in a cocktail lounge to cover rent and baby-sitting costs.

Soon, however her never-say-die spirit attracts new friends. She connects with a fellow Aussie, the feminist rock journalist Lillian Roxon (Danielle Macdonald), who becomes the engine of Reddy’s feminist consciousness-raising.

Roxon may be a more important figure than the movie makes clear; every rock critic in the 70s and 80s had a copy of Roxon’s Rock Encyclopedia on his or her desk. A movie that focused more on their relationship might have offered some richer rewards, but here her role seems functional, and her tell-tale cough from early scenes is a clumsy foreshadowing of her premature death.

The second key figure in Reddy’s life is Jeff Wald (Evan Peters), a brash and aspiring talent agent who she meets at a rent party and who takes her to stardom before almost ruining her career. The movie elides the couple’s period in Chicago and takes us to Los Angeles, where Wald gets wrapped up on promoting acts like Tiny Tim and Deep Purple. As Helen’s career is left on the backburner, Jeff develops an alarming case of the cocaine sniffles.

Still, through Helen’s forebearance and quiet insistence, she forces him to pester a Capitol records exec (Chris Parnell) to give her a chance to record a single. Although the actual campaign took five months, it’s boiled down to one long day for the film.

Finally, Helen hits the studio, with a voice provided by singer Chelsea Cullen (Reddy’s own recorded voice is used in other numbers) and everyone sits up and takes notice.

Performance sequences, well-shot by cinematographer Dione Beebe (Mary Poppins Returns) showcase Reddy in a wonderfully gaudy range of period-specific flowing pant suits and off-the-shoulder gowns. And, of course, we see the famous moment when Reddy won her 1973 Grammy (cutely edited to place Cobham-Hervey on the TV screen) when she thanked “God, because She makes everything possible.”

Scenes from the 1989 abortion rights rally in Los Angeles, Mobilize for Women’s Rights, show Reddy singing her signature song as women and men of different ethnicities, ages singing along to the lyrics (“I’m still an embryo….” etcetera).

While the performances are heart-warming, the characterization of Reddy feels reductive, overlooking the real-life contradictions, flinty humour, and eccentricities that might have made the performance less generic.

There was, for example, her performance on the Miss World telecast in 1981, when she brushed off feminist critics ("Let them step forward and pay my rent and I'll stay home.”) Or, as detailed in her memoir, Woman I Am, her entirely wacky fascination with reincarnation and the English royal family (i.e. Wallis Simpson was the reincarnation of Richard III?)

Nor does the script offer much context for the writing of the title song, entirely leaving out the controversial joint authorship with fellow Aussie co-writer Raymond Burton. The woman we get in I Am Woman is so single-minded, she’s one-dimensional.

I Am Woman. Directed by Unjoo Moon. Screenplay by Emma Jensen. Starring Tilda Cobham-Hervey, Danielle Macdonald, and Evan Peters. Available on Demand and digital across Canada beginning September 11.