A documentary by Jim Jarmusch. Rated PG

Stooges frontman Iggy Pop became famous for rolling around in broken glass, smearing himself with peanut butter, and getting punched out by bikers mid-performance. The iconic singer’s bandmates—drummer Scott Asheton, guitarists Ron Asheton and James Williamson, and bassist Dave Alexander—meanwhile displayed an appetite for booze and drug-fuelled self-destruction that would make vintage Keith Richards blanch.

Live Stooges shows in the ’60s and ’70s were famously anarchic, and the band’s recordings were so punishing, they basically invented the template for punk rock. So considering how all-around fucking badass the Stooges were during their all-too-brief initial run, it’s hard not to wish for something more from Gimmie Danger.

The weirdest thing about Jim Jarmusch’s love letter to the Motor City protopunks is that it comes across as anything but scary. Rather than revelling in the dirt and violence, Gimme Danger glosses over the addictions that helped tear the band apart, with Pop instead delivering a cute anecdote about receiving methadone from a pharmacist friend of his dad’s. And not to nitpick, but couldn’t Jarmusch have shot Pop’s interview segments in a place a little more rock ’n’ roll than what seems to be an enclosed back-porch laundry room?

Those curious about the back story of one of rock’s most-important-ever bands, however, will like the way that Gimme Danger fills in the blanks. Opting for straight-ahead and linear storytelling, Jarmusch conducts interviews with Pop, Scott Asheton, and James Williamson. (Ron Asheton, who died in 2009, pops up from beyond the grave in archival clips.)

The film starts with Pop’s high-school band the Iguanas, dutifully traces the creation of iconic albums like The Stooges and Raw Power, and then skips to the group’s unexpected-by-no-one reunion in the ’00s. Minor revelations include that the future Iggy Pop—who was born James Osterberg—spent some time drumming for obscure blues artists like Big Walter Horton. Post–Velvet Underground Nico hung around the Stooges’ dirtbag home base in Ann Arbor, Michigan, for a short while, presumably mesmerized—although consummation is never made clear—by Pop’s famously large pants python.

To truly get a handle on Gimme Danger’s shortcomings, compare it to essential Julien Temple documentaries like The Filth and the Fury and Joe Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten. Those films spent as much time on the cultural impact of their respective subjects—the Sex Pistols and the Clash—as they did on the bands. Gimme Danger is content to be a sanitized history lesson—the last thing you’d expect from a band that not only gave the world the immortal line “I’m a street-walking cheetah with a heart full of napalm,” but sounded like they meant it.