Patti Smith: Dream of Life

Shot in a mixture of crisp colour, grainy sepia and monochrome over ten years, director Steven Sebring does not attempt to inform viewers of a timeline in Patti Smith: Dream of Life. A beatnik, rock and roll mix of poetry and visuals merge together to show Smith as a creative, insightful, chaotic artist, declaring she will not move from one corner of a room until the documentary is finished. The room in question is cluttered and full of old memorabilia; from her ancient, battered guitar (Bob Dylan once tuned it for her) to her box of nostalgia from childhood, her tastes are as eclectic as her image and music.

Sebring includes footage from gigs, where Smith is shouty, rambling, a blurring of punk-rock. Off stage she is rather quieter and more earthbound than one might expect, witty and soft-spoken, spouting William Blake and politics. It is the latter that jars slightly – one questions the authority any musician, even Patti Smith, has over others about Iraq, and a brief shot of Bono simply aggravates further.

Dream of Life is what it says it is. Overlapping dialogue, poetry recitals and songs mean viewers are invited to drift in and out, to focus on what they choose to. A lack of structured time or colour scheme reiterates this dreamlike quality, so that those who have followed her career will not be bored, and those unfamiliar with her work will be intrigued. Smith states she always felt the need to be pushed, to be simultaneously creative and destructive, and it is delightfully refreshing to see a musician who has not allowed her creativity to be her personal destruction. Instead, Patti Smith has “wandered through the debris of the sixties”, experienced fame, loss, happiness, birth and death, and come out smiling. [Becky Bartlett]