Patti Smith: Dream of Life

This documentary portrait was 11 years in the making. Patti Smith gets greyer, her son grows up, the elderly parents we see in one charming sequence pass on…  So fashion photographer Steven Sebring’s intimacy with his subject is understandable, palpable indeed. If only his purpose in gathering all this material was as evident.

Smith is deserving of the attention, a true poet who harnessed her muse to crunching guitars, then survived personal loss to return to performing and political activism on fervent and wise terms. Sebring’s assemblage eschews any linear approach to her story, offering instead a herky-jerky collage, which, for all its transient black-and-white beauties, denies its subject the sort of solid context that would reveal the scale of her achievements. A patchy, frustrating, though loving tribute.