A documentary by Steven Sebring. Rating unavailable. Opens Friday, October 31, at the Granville 7

To make Patti Smith: Dream of Life, fashion photographer Steven Sebring spent almost a dozen years with the poet and performer, capturing her return to the stage after a 16-year absence during which she raised two children (one plays guitar with her now) and survived the losses of many close to her. These included her beloved brother Todd, husband Fred "Sonic" Smith (their last names were, coincidentally, the same before marriage), and mentors Allen Ginsberg and Robert Mapplethorpe, who made a mid-'70s icon of her in that androgynous cover for Horses, her debut album.

Today, she's a lot greyer but just as skinny, still looks like Keith Richards, and—especially as one of the last links to the beatnik ethos of the 1950s—continues to cajole and provoke, both on-stage and off. Within the impressionistically rambling documentary's grainy, mostly black-and-white footage, there are performance clips from several periods of travel, although more time is spent with backstage patter that too often seems to go nowhere.

Smith's affectedly flat, off-screen recitation of biographical timelines doesn't exactly make contexts clear. You also have to work a bit to understand basic developments, such as the fact that she is handling Mapplethorpe's ashes in a poignant sequence at her current home in the Chelsea Hotel. More straightforward are musical and social meetings with the likes of Michael Stipe, Bob Dylan, long-time bandmate Lenny Kaye, and Sam Shepard, who, ages ago, bought her the old Gibson guitar she still strums today. The fact that she has never learned to play remains part of her charm and yet perplexes; Smith is smitten by her prismatic vision of the world, and her fans don't care that the vision is only occasionally touched by craft.