"Patti Smith: Dream of Life" Premieres Tonight on PBS

HANK ALTOGETHER:

Seminal punk, poetess, painter, and just about anything else that you can think of that starts with the letter "p," Patti Smith is unveiling a documentary to the rest of us in the US tonight on PBS. Shot over 11 years, Patti Smith: Dream of Life spans Smith's strong cultural influence. In addition to being one kick-ass rocker, Smith collaborated with some of the most stunning visual artists of the past 20 years like Robert Mapplethorpe. Previously only seen at 2008 Sundance, PBS is showing the whole thing tonight. Click here for the schedule.

Here's how PBS describes it:

Patti Smith: Dream of Life, winner of a 2008 Sundance Film Festival Award for Excellence in Cinematography, is a riveting, intimate telling of Smith's long, strange trip. She may not be the only middle-class Jersey girl to have made the leap to New York City in pursuit of artistic dreams, but she may be the only one to have emerged — and survived — as a multifaceted poet, artist and rock star. Through performance footage, interviews, poems, paintings, photographs and Smith's voice-over reminiscences, Dream of Life reveals a complicated, charismatic personality wrestling with the paradoxes of being an artist in America and of being a woman in a male-dominated music scene.

Smith also wrestles with the tragedies — the deaths of her husband and brother — that brought her back to New York and to performing. Layering Smith's words over innovative camera techniques, the film explores how one woman discovered herself through music, how she survived tragedy, how she raised two children and how she endeavors in a quest for peace, for herself and for the world.