Featuring Frank Zappa. Rating unavailable

Consisting entirely of Frank Zappa interviews and performances culled from three decades of footage, Eat That Question has an almost symphonic flow. Roughly following his subject’s chronology, German director Thorsten Schütte uses no title cards or narration to tell a fascinating story uncomplicated by recent family disputes.

From his clean-shaven start, playing a bicycle accompanied by studio orchestra on The Steve Allen Show, Zappa displayed his trademark combination of high seriousness and Dadaistic cheek. After that beard grew in, he became a surprisingly charismatic bandleader, especially with his groundbreaking Mothers of Invention. Skinny and often shirtless, he’s seen leading various iterations at rehearsals and concerts, with songs that veered between doo-wop melodiousness to Stravinsky-like rhythmic bombast. (No other musos, later including top players like George Duke and Ruth Underwood, are identified.)

In interviews, mostly for European and U.S. regional TV, the musician could be irascible or shticky, but frequently funny and always highly articulate. Even if his lyrics were often puerile or just plain silly, Zappa was a tireless foe of censorship, particularly when attached to fundamentalist rhetoric. “All this talk about the right to life,” he states vehemently. “What about the right to life of an unborn idea?”

Zappa also opposed drug usage, railing against the harmful things people put in their bodies. It’s hard to miss, then, that he is holding a cigarette in almost every frame—even after being diagnosed with the cancer that would kill him in 1993. In his later, more weary stage, he even embraces the notion of being completely forgotten. Not likely.