"Patti Smith: Dream of Life," a Haunting, Beautiful Video Collage

This movie, www.dreamoflifethemovie.com/, ostensibly a documentary or "rockumentary," is a layered, nuanced film that hits the audience like an epic poem of words, images, and song. While the film may give little substantively on Patti Smith's amazing achievements and incredible life journey, it does reveal the surfaces, chronologically overlapped and mis-mashed of an amazing, trailblazing woman and her life. The film, apparently in the making for 12 years, is a performance piece that, in the free-spirited, artistic tradition of Patti Smith, refuses to play by the rules or conform to expectations. The result is a fantastic collage of her amiable, profoundly unique personality over the years.


Patti Smith tells the camera how bizarre it is having people come up to you and ask how it feels to be a rock icon, and that this label always makes her think of Mt. Rushmore. It is this quality of humility, warmth and humor that the film conveys, along with her deeply entrenched spiritual and musical sense of self.

I recommend learning more about Patti Smith and sitting back to appreciate her amazing accomplishments as a female rock-poet goddess. The film is now showing at Film Forum.

Two insightful reviews about the film that I recommend: Jesus died for somebody's sins ... but not hers (Salon.com) and "Patti Smith: Dream of Life," Godmother of Punk, Celebrator of Life (nytimes.com).