By TERRENCE RAFFERTY

When Steven Sebring began filming Patti Smith, 12 years ago, he was, by his own admission, pretty much an amateur. He made his living as a fashion photographer, as he still does. He didn’t own a movie camera. He had been hired by Spin magazine to shoot some pictures for a story on Ms. Smith, but he didn’t know very much about his subject, the singer, poet and artist whose 1975 album “Horses” had, if not revolutionized rock ‘n’ roll, at least infused it with a new and arresting sort of incantatory power.
“Patti Smith: Dream of Life,” the movie Mr. Sebring emerged with after years of on-and-off filming, bears almost no resemblance to any other documentary about the punk-rock heroes of Ms. Smith’s turbulent era. “Over the years,” Mr. Sebring said, “Patti’s been approached by a lot of filmmakers who wanted to do these rock ‘n’ roll historical pieces, and she’s just never been interested in that. She says, ‘You know, I’m alive, and I have more to say and a lot more things to do, and I don’t need anybody talking about me.’”
But when she and Mr. Sebring met, there was, he said, “an immediate connection.” Ms. Smith had been living in Detroit for a decade and a half with her husband, the guitarist Fred (Sonic) Smith, rarely recording and never performing. After her husband’s death, in 1994, she put together a band, finished the album “Gone Again” and was preparing to appear onstage for the first time since the end of the ‘70s. It was the first live performance of her tour, at Irving Plaza in New York, that gave Mr. Sebring the idea of making a film.
“She was a totally different woman onstage,” he said, “nothing like the person I’d photographed in Detroit. I thought, this is too interesting not to put on film.”
And then “Patti really let me into her life,” he said. “I think it intrigued her that I didn’t know a lot about her, that I’d just be getting to know her through my lens.”
The big decision - a choice that an outside producer would have tried to talk him out of - was to shoot “Dream of Life” on 16 millimeter film rather than video. “Using video,” he said, “which I was sometimes tempted to do when I was broke, would have felt like cheating to me. It’s not the same look. With film there’s, you know, more love in it.
And besides, film is one of those old-fashioned things that Ms. Smith, in her eccentric, new-fashioned way, has always been keen to commemorate. In “Dream of Life she rummages through objects she has saved - photos, an urn, a dress her mother made her - and tells little stories about them. She visits her parents in New Jersey; she goes to Jerusalem and reflects at the Wailing Wall. “She looks at this as a home movie,” Mr. Sebring said, “a home movie that’s also some kind of collaborative art piece.”
Although he used some of his more familiar skills in making the movie (“Being a fashion photographer, I made sure she looked her best all the time”), he seems, on the whole to have absorbed his subject’s determination to remain, in every aspect of her art, an inspired amateur.
Ms. Smith’s brand of amateurishness is an article of faith for her, and its power can be hard to account for. Asked whether he now missed filming Ms. Smith, Mr. Sebring replied, with a barely audible sigh: “Oh, I still do. She calls, and he packs his camera. “She won’t let me go.