Joni Mitchell teams up with Cameron Crowe to script her biopic

Cameron Crowe, the director of Almost Famous and Jerry Maguire, is developing a new drama film with Joni Mitchell about her life.

According to a story on the entertainment site Above the Line – which was subsequently reposted on Mitchell’s own website – the project is not a documentary and Mitchell has been collaborating with Crowe on the script for the past two years.

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Crowe made his name as a teenager writing for Rolling Stone and Creem magazines, experiences he went on to dramatise in Almost Famous. He is a music fanatic and has a longstanding friendship with Mitchell, who he has interviewed numerous times; in 2017 he accompanied her to her first public appearance, a Grammy awards gala, since suffering a brain aneurysm two years earlier.

Crowe has not directed a feature film since the romcom Aloha in 2015, which was was a box office failure and was criticised for the casting of Emma Stone as a character with Hawaiian and Chinese heritage. In 2019, he produced the documentary David Crosby: Remember My Name, about the folk-rock singer-songwriter who died in January this year.

Mitchell, 79, has not released a studio album since 2007’s Shine and kept a low profile after her 2015 aneurysm. But she returned to live performance with a surprise set at Newport folk festival in July 2022, playing 13 songs alongside Brandi Carlile and others, and is booked to play another solo show in June at Washington state’s Gorge Amphitheatre. A live album of her Newport performance is also planned, she told Elton John in an interview in November.

Previously unreleased material has also emerged in recent years across a series of six archival releases by the label Rhino, beginning with Joni Mitchell Archives – Vol. 1: The Early Years (1963–1967) in 2020.