Patti Smith: Dream of Life

Patti Smith and Steven Sebring have put 11 years of effort into this artistic interpretation of Smith’s own rock biopic, A Dream of Life. It’s avowedly non-linear and poetic in spirit. It’s also implausibly dull.

Defined by her brave, unorthodox femininity, masterful way with words and anarchic approach to politics, Smith is a modern American legend. And the lank-haired one doesn’t just let anyone film her non-stop for over a decade, so the footage here is firstly a rarity, and secondly, of huge interest to her committed fans. It’s quite a coup for first-time feature director Sebring.

It starts promisingly – in grainy black-and-white on a train, Patti narrates her birth, childhood, marriage to Fred ‘Sonic’ Smith and the fall-out from his early death, which was rapidly followed by her brother’s. Sebring has his subject set up why this movie matters, following as it does years of self-imposed exile from the media glare and her significant coming out on the other side as a single mother and middle-aged agit-poet.

So, we think, at last an insight into this heroine is on the cards; friend to the strays (Ginsberg, Burroughs), stars (Dylan, Stipe) and spiritual descendent of Rimbaud and Blake. But what you get is nostalgia and name-dropping (the precise date at which Dylan tuned the guitar she admits she can’t play) and a director too besotted with Smith to enter the editing suite.

Live footage of crowd-pleasers like ‘Land’ and ‘Gloria’ provides a welcome chance to see Smith at her best, as do shots of her moving renditions of poems or simply being psyched at an anti-America political rally. But when we’re asked to follow her around the globe to watch her pose by poets’ gravestones, the homage goes too far. Even a scene where she returns to her family to eat hamburgers – given added poignancy as her 61-year-old parents have since deceased – is flatly humourless.

It’s awful to think fashion photographer Sebring spent 11 years behind his 16mm Bolex to produce this. After the first four years, he maxed out his credit card to the tune of $100,000. Not one to give up, he scaled down his operations and, aiming to get to the heart of Patti as a person and not just a rock star, filmed her sitting in the corner of her bedroom, with only her most important belongings as aides-mémoires.

And yet, unless you like endlessly romanticising about Walt Whitman and William Blake and blah and blah, there’s really nothing to see here, folks.

Georgie Hobbs

Anticipation:

Godmother of Punk finally bares her soul.

Enjoyment:

Jesus died for somebody’s sins… this film was one of them.

In Retrospect:

Eleven years spent on all that? Really?