Patti Smith: Dream of Life

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This article was published 03/11/2008 (6153 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

FILM REVIEW: PATTI SMITH: DREAM OF LIFE
By Michael Phillips
Chicago Tribune Movie Critic
3 stars
Patti Smith recalls that she once found herself face-to-face with a Modigliani portrait, and the poet, artist and rock goddess couldn’t help herself: She had to touch it, to “feel the texture.” Smith herself, in the days of “Horses” and now, resembles a Modigliani, her angles sharp and distinct, her compellingly androgynous features demanding our attention.
The film “Patti Smith: Dream of Life,” a decade-long chronicle of “a series of lucky and unlucky accidents” that make up all our lives, demands our attention as well. It’s a story of an artist’s itchy search for expression, in poetry, travel, motherhood, political activism, the whole American pop ball of wax.
The director is Steven Sebring, who met Smith on a photo shoot in the mid-1990s. At the time Smith was recently widowed, living in Detroit with her kids. Sebring gained her trust, and shooting on 16 mm film, he captured concert and backstage and daily-life footage in Japan, France, Israel and beyond, and most indelibly, in New York. At a different point in her life Smith lived in the legendary Chelsea Hotel. (She was born, she says in voice-over, in 1946 in Chicago, “mainline of America, in the center of a blizzard.”) “Patti Smith: Dream of Life” does more than hand you a lot of rich performance footage of a vital, fiercely honest performer: A recollection of Manhattan bohemia comes to life, notably when she reunites with her old pal Sam Shepard for an on-screen duet on guitar. These hard-living comrades clearly get a kick out of each other’s company.
If one thing holds the picture back, it’s the self-conscious album-cover aesthetic of Sebring’s visual approach. He mixes up black-and-white and color, fine-grained and coarse-grained travelogue footage, re-creating the visual vibe of D.A. Pennebaker’s Bob Dylan documentary “Don’t Look Back.” The effect is somewhat mannered: A lot of the film is genuinely hypnotic, but sometimes Sebring hits cinematic “shuffle” mode and can’t get out.
Smith’s life and times and lucky and unlucky accidents carry the day, though, and the film. “Dream of Life” works without most of the usual constraints of bio-portraiture. And when Sebring’s camera records an unseen Smith singing along with Nat King Cole’s rendition of “Stardust” in the car, you’re reminded that people will be singing along with Smith, generations from now.
No MPAA rating (some language).
Running time: 1:49.
Opening: Friday at the Music Box Theatre, 3733 N. Southport Ave.
Featuring: Patti Smith, Sam Shepard, Jackson Smith, Jesse Smith, Tom Verlaine, Philip Glass, Benjamin Smoke, Flea.
Directed by Steven Sebring; photographed by Phillip Hunt and Steven Sebring; edited by Angelo Corrao and Lin Polito; music performed by Patti Smith, Lenny Kaye, Oliver Ray, Tony Shanahan and Jay Dee Daugherty; produced by Sebring, Margaret Smilow and Scott Vogel. A Thirteen/WNET New York and Clean Socks release.