Comes the announcement that Palm Pictures will open Steven Sebring‘s Patti Smith: Dream of Life in theatres sometime in September. Great — I’ve been waiting for someone to step up. The film will be preceded by Sebring’s hardcover book version which will hit stores in late August, as well as a live-performance Smith CD called The Coral Sea in early July.

Sebring’s film “is an authentic spiritual adventure film,” I wrote after a Sundance viewing five months ago. “A mostly black-and-white exploration of Smith’s life, loves, history, poetry, music, alliances and relationships, it feels at times like a companion piece to D.A. Pennebaker‘s Don’t Look Back (the monochrome classic about Bob Dylan touring England in the mid ’60s); at other times like a patchwork meditation, a home movie, a concert film, a fashion show.
“It’s about music, heroes, rants, chants, parents, deaths, declarations and determinations.
“For me, the authenticity is in the way Sebring has captured (or emulated) the grit and textures of Smith’s prose, and the fierce spiritual tension that her band music has always injected in one form or another. ‘Life is an adventure of our own design…a series of lucky and unlucky accidents,’ yes…but having a locomotive inside you helps.
“There is no boredom or lethargy in this lady’s life…not a lick of this. The movie is a pleasure, a journey, an attic sift-through, a huge charge. I could see it again today if I wasn’t so buried.”