Patti Smith: Dream of Life

Two Amateurs, Reinventing the Wheel

WHEN Steven Sebring began filming Patti Smith, 12 years ago, he was, by his own admission, pretty much an amateur. He made his living as a fashion photographer, as he still does. He didn’t own a movie camera. (He now does.) He had been hired by Spin magazine to shoot some pictures for a story on Ms. Smith, and although his wife, he said, “nearly fell off her chair” when he told her about the assignment, he didn’t know very much about his subject, the singer, poet and artist whose 1975 album “Horses” had, if not revolutionized rock ’n’ roll, at least infused it with a new and arresting sort of incantatory power. »

Godmother of Punk, Celebrator of Life

You may not learn everything you want to know in “Patti Smith: Dream of Life,” an impressionistic portrait of that punk godhead, but you learn just about everything you need. Created over a heroic 11 years, it was directed and mostly shot by Steven Sebring, a high-end commercial photographer whose perseverance and conspicuous unfamiliarity with, or disregard for, the conventions of nonfiction cinema (not to mention the apparently deep-enough pockets that freed him to follow his own muse) have inspired a lovely, drifty first feature that feels less like a documentary and more like an act of rapturous devotion. »

The 'godmother of punk' is chronicled in 11 years of a friend's home-movie-like footage

Steven Sebring's "Patti Smith: Dream of Life" is a dream of a movie; gauzy, free-associative and reverberant. Shot over 11 years by a commercial photographer who befriended the poet, rock star, activist and "godmother of punk" in the mid-'90s, when Smith returned to New York following the death of her husband, it drifts and floats between footage of her as a young woman in the '60s and '70s and rambling home-movie-like footage of her life today. Of course, Smith's home movies happen to include moments like an impromptu jam session with Sam Shepherd and travels to Tokyo, London, Rome, Israel and Washington, where she attends a giant antiwar rally. »