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PATTI SMITH: DREAM OF LIFE
Directed by Steven Sebring
Produced by Sebring, Margaret Smilow & Scott Vogel
Released by Palm Pictures
USA. 109 min. Not Rated
With Patti Smith, Lenny Kaye, Oliver Ray, Tony Shanahan, Jay Dee Daugherty, Jacklson Smith, Jesse Smith, Tom Verlaine, Sam Shepard, Philip Glass, Benjamin Smoke & Flea

“Life is an adventure of our own design,” says Patti Smith, “intersected by fate in a series of lucky and unlucky accidents.” Like her heroes Arthur Rimbaud and Bob Dylan, part of Patti Smith’s mystique has always been that she’s elusive and hard to pin down. Before Patti Smith: Dream of Life, the feature film debut of fashion photographer Steven Sebring, it was difficult to find Smith on screen outside of concert footage and some early collaborations with Robert Mapplethorpe. It’s likely that Smith would have said “no” to a known filmmaker aiming to make her the subject of a conventional documentary.

Patti Smith is instead a highly interior journey into her influences and world-view. Her way of inhabiting the human world is different than most—she’s this strange, skinny creature who seems to feed on art and poetry. Sebring’s vision of her life is at times very beautiful. We see her children through her eyes, her closeness to her rural parents, her powerful anti-war activism, and her love of animals. In doing so, we also get to know her unique brand of humor and turn of phrase.

If the artistic influences that shape Smith’s work are at the center of the film (like William S. Burroughs or New York City as a place where an artist can be formed or deformed, created, or destroyed), the predictable themes that are of great importance in most documentaries are entirely missing. Part of me really enjoyed Sebring’s freeform, experimental style, and part of me got hungry for some basics—how does Patti Smith really feel about her public role? How does she deal with being a famous woman who does not match up to conventional celebrity beauty images, an issue that has consumed and troubled many successful women in the music world? When asked what it’s like to be an icon, Smith says she thinks of Mount Rushmore. Cute, but this is a woman who didn’t grow up with much, who once worked in a factory, and who consciously decided to transform herself into an artist. Why did it work so well for her?

Although it’s a documentary and not a biopic, in many ways Patti Smith is the movie that Todd Haynes’s Bob Dylan-inspired film I’m Not There (2007) was trying to be. Sebring reveals several different Patti Smiths: the tough activist, the sweet little girl, the stylish punk rocker, the grandiose decadent poet. Like I’m Not There, it stays impressionistic (or maybe expressionistic), purposively avoiding rock star clichés. It’s a beautiful piece of work that allows the icon to remain elusive, and that’s a mixed blessing. Elizabeth Bachner
August 5, 2008