Singer Courtney Barnett and filmmaker Danny Cohen discuss their new doc ‘Anonymous Club’

By Brian Braiker

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When you think of rock and roll tour documentaries your mind may go to the outsized debauchery of the 1970s and ‘80s. Sex, drugs, groupies, trashed hotel rooms.

You get none of that in “Anonymous Club,” a new intimate portrait of Australian singer-songwriter Courtney Barnett, which came out last week from Oscilloscope Films.

A film by Barnett’s collaborator, Danny Cohen, who has shot several of her music videos, “Anonymous Club” pulls the curtain back on the life of an introverted DIY artist experiencing — and going on tour in the aftermath of — an unpredictable and dizzying level of almost instantaneous success.

“We’d kind of been working together for a while and the idea of the doco came about and we thought we’d just see how it goes,” Cohen said in an interview last week. “This is definitely not what either of us thought it was going to be. But we kind of just started by doing two tours together and just filming. And Courtney kept the diary.”

Shot over three years, the film follows Barnett on tour through Europe, Asia and the States, performing to huge crowds, and grappling with her own anxiety, anhedonia and imposter syndrome. Cohen tasked her with keeping an audio diary through the whole process and her narration dots the film in ways that are witty, moving, sad and wistful.

“It was a really interesting experiment for me,” said Barnett. “It wasn’t the most comfortable thing for me but it was challenging for me in a good way and … once I got on a roll — a 20 minute ramble — it maybe kind of unlocked something interesting.”

Barnett and Cohen were both speaking after a screening of the “Anonymous Club” at Angelika Film Center in Manhattan last week. Barnett was in town to perform her music — introspective, sly, relatable, angsty — at Radio City Music Hall last Thursday, a make-up gig from a show she had to cancel in February due to Covid.

In front of a live, sold-out movie theater, the two discussed the making of the film and how she sees her role as an artist.

“My music, a lot of it is kind of documenting my life and this moment in my life, how I’m kind of moving through something, or how I’m feeling in that moment,” she said. “Film feels similar. I think it’s just connecting with people through those stories.”

Connecting to her audience, and finding meaning through that connection ends up being a central theme. She discussed all of that and persevering through doubt in a conversation that was recorded and you can hear in this week’s episode of “Brooklyn Magazine: The Podcast.”

“Courtney, as you can see in the film, isn’t, like, amazing on camera. Which is fine,” said Cohen to laughs from the audience. He explained the use of the audio diary as a way to reach a kind of truth that’s hard to get in on-the-spot interviews (there are a few of those in the film, too, and they are agonizing).

“It’s a device to let Courtney talk about how she’s feeling whenever she feels comfortable without the pressure of the camera,” he said.

Not that Barnett enjoyed keeping the audio diary (which goes into dark and doubtful terrain as well as more playful and peaceful places). The first snippet we hear in the movie is a clip of her saying she can’t figure out how to delete audio diary.

By the end of the film you get a portrait of Barnett as an artist who has gone through a period of growth — and all of the doubt and hardship that entails — and emerged a better artist for it. Not least of all because she keeps finding ways to put herself in uncomfortable situations. Like being interviewed in front of a full house at Angelika Film Center on a hot Tuesday night.

Check out this episode of “Brooklyn Magazine: The Podcast” for more. Subscribe and listen wherever you get your podcasts.