Some artists invite a particular kind of fandom. It’s not just an appreciation of their ouput; it’s a kind of psychic immersion, a fascination with everything that they are and everything that contributes to their work. It’s not enough to describe Patti Smith as a musician, any more than it is to thus categorise Prince or Bob Dylan or David Bowie. Such figures create cults of personality, and entire universes of reference points; as well as possessing uncommon personal talent and charisma, they are conduits for artistic and cultural ideas.

Smith’s extraordinary 1975 debut album “Horses” changed the landscape, and has been having a revelatory effect on new converts ever since. (Though writer Charles Shaar Murray felt the need to note four separate times in the NME’s rave review that he didn’t find Smith attractive – which kind of shows you just how badly the smug, pseudo-politicised boy-rock elite needed a real female icon to come along and kick them in the danglies.) Smith has since gone on to establish herself as a poet of note, and one of rock’s most agile, daring, literate performers.

This film, constructed over 11 years by fashion photographer Stephen Sebring, provides a warm, impressionistic portrait of the artist – and a tale of survival, detailing as it does Smith’s recovery from the unexpected deaths in winter 1994 of her husband, Fred “Sonic” Smith of the MC5, and her brother Todd.

Smith proves to be no dour self-regarder, however, but a fun, endearing guide – joshing with her elderly parents about what they wish her to play onstage (“Only for you would I play a medley, Mom ...”); chatting informally to friends and collaborators including Michael Stipe, Philip Glass and Sam Shepard; and bossily dispatching her handsome young boyfriend and guitarist Oliver Ray to buy her stage clothes from Prada. The result is a touching, irreverent, wise tribute to a woman never cowed or changed by others’ expectations.