Whether you love his music or loathe it, Frank Zappa is a mesmerizing personality. This is the hunch behind Eat That Question: Frank Zappa in His Own Words, which distills more than 30 years of interviews with the cranky, censor-baiting musician-composer into two remarkably informative (and entertaining) hours.

Beginning in 1962 with the self-possessed 22-year-old holding his own against Steve Allen—Zappa appeared on Allen’s nationally syndicated show to conduct an improvised suite for bicycle, ahem—director Thorsten Schütte’s film, opening Friday (July 8), is loaded with laser-sharp pronouncements from the unfailing freethinker.

“You can’t please everybody, I’m sure, but so far we’re getting away with very good reviews,” an ebullient Schütte says, calling the Georgia Straight from Manhattan after a successful New York premiere. “Apparently, we have produced something that’s very meaningful to some people!”

The German filmmaker entered into the project with understandable trepidation. The endorsement of the Zappa Family Trust was no guarantee that his movie would win the favour of a fan base reasonably described as devout. But, as the title implies, Eat That Question wisely elects to let Frank do all the talking. We’re left with a portrait of an artist sitting at an awkward angle to his own culture, whether he’s pouring scorn on “fucked fans craving the early albums” or concluding years later that “people are just not accustomed to excellence.”

Schütte’s own encounter with Zappa began when he heard “Who Are the Brain Police?” at a very tender stage in his development. “It was so overburdening and challenging that I, as a 12-year-old, was sitting there thinking, ‘What the fuck is this?’ ” he recalls.

Graduating to the full-length Just Another Band From L.A., with its 25-minute opening track, “Billy the Mountain”, the teenage Schütte found himself pondering: “How can a song be so long? How can a song contain so many colours? How can a song be so noisy? Why are people doing this?”

“It just evoked so many questions,” he says, as did the curious content Schütte encountered in a 1975 published translation of Zappa’s lyrics. “When you read those things at the age of 15, you don’t understand a sentence like, ‘The crux of the biscuit is the apostrophe,’ ” he explains, chuckling. “I still don’t understand it today.”

Zappa himself remarks, “I hate to see anybody with a closed mind,” which makes Schütte an ideal advocate. In short, he went from “the Beatles and the Bay City Rollers” to the infinitely more challenging world of Hot Rats and composers like Igor Stravinsky and Anton Webern. “Moon calls it the secret handshake,” he says, referring to Zappa’s daughter. “Once you’ve been contaminated with that, it allows you to be very open-eared and open-minded. It’s nice if you make an encounter with that at a very early age. I owe him a great deal.”