Zappa is the exact documentary you want to see if you are a fan of Frank Zappa. It’s absolutely as weird and irreverent as his music but still functions as a solid biography and examination of the musician. 

It posits Zappa as someone we likely already know: a deeply intelligent man who had an anti-authoritian streak a mile wide. He was also, to some who knew him, a cold, controlling individual. Most of the musicians he worked with were considered, as guitarist Steve Vai exclaims, tools “for the composer … and he used them brilliantly.” His horn player, Bunk Gardner, from the Mothers of Invention, was in the band for years and only remembers one time when Zappa walked over to him after a show and said, “Good job.” He was a hard man to know and a hard man to pin down, and the film celebrates him without sugarcoating him. If you aren’t a fan of Zappa and his music, this is still worth watching as a portrait of an utterly fascinating man.

Zappa grew up in the conservative small town of Lancaster, California, in the 1950s, a decade ripe with paranoia regarding the Communist Soviet Union. His dad worked in a plant that made nerve gas and would come home with gas masks for his kids to play with. Zappa remembers running around in his backyard wearing one, believing it was a space helmet. For a while, he thought he would be a chemist, but then he stumbled onto two things: composer Edgar Varèse, an avant-garde composer whose works strongly featured percussion instruments, and American R&B. 

From here, his obsession moved to music. He eventually opened a tiny recording studio where he made tapes for hire and began to scrape a living in the mid-1960s. However, he was arrested by the vice squad on ridiculous obscenity charges and sentenced to prison for six months. When he was released, his anti-authority and individuality street cred was sealed. The experience was clearly formative to him in the way he saw the world.

Zappa the musician is examined here in full, as music becomes his main mode of expression and that’s what most die-hards are going to come to this movie for, and they’re going to get it—including a tremendous amount of footage of his band, the Mothers of Invention; live performances on Saturday Night Live; and snippets of Zappa’s classically inspired work performed by orchestras and the esteemed Kronos Quartet. His wife, Gail, specifically states that she “married a composer.”

Along with his prodigious musical talent and excellent musicianship, Zappa was endowed with a wicked sense of humor. According to him, “the whole world was absurd,” and through his music, he reflected that. For the uninitiated, his work can be incredibly off putting, but boy is it fascinating.

Zappa the person is, somehow, more compelling, in my mind, than the music. He is incredibly confident but emotionally aloof and one of the most articulate and thoughtful celebrities you are going to come across. He has a definite philosophy of what art is, and thinks most music is crap, but he hates snobs of all sorts. His wife says that, if he knew you well, you could be a total screwup and he would be there for you. If he didn’t, “you got one shot.” 

Though a mess of contradictions, he definitely was driven to create. He never stopped, even when someone leaped up and stabbed him on stage in the 1970s. In the year he needed to coalesce, he made a movie with Bruce Bickford. The 1982 hit song “Valley Girl” came to be because his teenage daughter Moon Unit slipped a note under his door introducing herself, as she barely saw him since he was constantly on tour, by mentioning one of her talents: she could do a funny Valley girl accent. 

Anyone who has seen the debut of director Alex Winter (Bill of the famous “Bill & Ted”), Freaked (1993), knows Winter is absolutely simpatico with the Zappa sense of absurdity, especially in his free association editing of the barrage of visuals. Rarely has a documentary’s tone been in sync with its subject so precisely. I am sure somewhere in rock and roll heaven, Frank Zappa is smiling down on this project while also railing about how conformist and boring and consumerist rock and roll heaven is.