In November 1994, punk-poet-rocker Patti Smith lost her husband Fred "Sonic" Smith, the famed MC5 guitarist, to a heart attack at age 45.
For the next 11 years, fashion photographer Steven Sebring trained his camera on her, her two children with Fred -- Jackson and Jesse -- her bandmates, her parents, and assorted famous people in her life, such as Sam Shepard, Michael Stipe, Phillip Glass and Flea.
The end result is an experimental, rambling yet ultimately deeply personal documentary, Patti Smith: Dream of Life, named after the 1988 album she made with her husband.
The film is essentially the story of Smith's journey back from a series of major losses: In 1989 she lost friend, photographer and onetime Chelsea Hotel roommate Robert Mapplethorpe to complications from AIDS; in 1991 her longtime keyboardist Richard Sohl died of a rheumatic heart; and just a month after her husband died in 1994, so did her beloved brother Todd.
The movie also seems to be about the wide-ranging influence of poets, painters, photographers and musicians who made the now 61-year-old Smith the revered artist she is today -- and how that art, ultimately, saved her.
"Everyone loses someone and it alters you, not necessarily for the bad," says Smith at one point in the film. "My heart was really filled with my brother after he died. All his finest qualities somehow entered me as a human being when he died."
In voiceover narration, Smith herself sums up her life story in the opening minutes: New Jersey-born, Philly-raised before heading to New York on her own for that fateful 1967 meeting with Mapplethorpe and later marrying Smith, and moving to Michigan and having two kids.
It's a disappointingly pithy introduction, but then Sebring increasingly draws out more personal information from Smith as the non-linear film slowly unfolds.
Dream of Life takes a while to find its rhythm but once it does, it's riveting stuff.
There's plenty of Smith's music and poetry, old and new concert footage, vintage photographs, and scenes of Smith herself talking photographs with an old Polaroid, strumming a guitar and painting in her cluttered New York apartment, and travelling the world or attending anti-war protests.
But it's those revealing little nuggets of information, and interactions, that really make Dream of Life worth watching.
Whether she's impersonating Bob Dylan or William Burroughs -- the latter was the "spiritual godfather" for Smith's startling 1975 debut album, Horses -- or strumming an acoustic guitar, singing and comparing tattoos with her old pal Shepard, she's a fascinating documentary subject.
In addition to being incredibly funny, Smith is also deeply sentimental whether she is showing off her favourite dress as a young child, her son's shirt worn home from the hospital after he was born, or the tiny Persian urn that holds some of Mapplethorpe's remains.
"It's nice to have him," Smith says. "I can travel with him or take him places."
And yet Sebring's non-linear storytelling sometimes takes away from the power and inherent drama of the material. Still, Smith probably loves the fact that Sebring, in his feature directing debut, has chosen such a messy approach.
"Life isn't some vertical or horizontal line," she says in the documentary. "You have your own interior world and it's not neat."
Neither is Dream of Life.
(This film is rated PG)
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