Matt Wolf’s delicate, elegiac documentary pays overdue tribute to an artist whose multi-faceted body of work has found a new and passionate audience since his death in 1992. Arthur Russell was a shy farmboy from Iowa who played the classical cello and dreamed of commercial recognition as a singer/songwriter. Instead, he joined a San Fransisco commune, and began adding his spine-tingling cello and unearthly vocals to spiritual mantras intoned by Allen Ginsberg. When the commune disapproved of his too-studious and non-communal cello practice, he moved to New York City, where he became musical director at the legendary art space The Kitchen, played with The Modern Lovers and Talking Heads, and contributed to dance and musical productions.

Still, the yearning to make mainstream pop was in him. “He wanted to make bubblegum,” Ginsberg noted, “but Buddhist bubblegum”. When disco hit New York, Russell found his adoring crowd – but kept his own identity masked behind a variety of pseudonyms, among them Loose Joints and Dinosaur L. The resulting output represents some of the most imaginative, infectious and cathartic dancefloor music of its time; he also continued to record and perform intimate, angular cello and vocal pieces. Both extremes of his oeuvre retain a freshness that belies the passage of decades.

This complex man remains appropriately elusive in this film, which emphasises his untouchability as well as his greatness: though there are rare glimpses of candid musical moments, there is no footage of Russell speaking directly into the camera or explaining his work. He is interpreted by those who knew and loved him, including his genteel parents, who still seem somewhat baffled by what they created; his lover Tom Lee, who only found out their relationship wasn’t monogamous when Russell contracted the HIV virus; and his collaborators, including Philip Glass and David Mancuso. The image that emerges is of a private, driven individual whose creativity had fathomless depths.