Review: Zappa Is a Richly Three-Dimensional Portrait of a Rock Iconoclast

As a rock star who most people have heard of but couldn’t identify one of his songs, Frank Zappa had a somewhat perverse relationship to fame. The Zappa who comes through in Alex Winter’s appreciative but sometimes cutting documentary that bears the iconoclast’s name held the music industry in almost as much contempt as he did many of his fans. More than once during its 126-minute runtime, Zappa suggests that for the musician concerts weren’t opportunities to commune with like-minded souls, but, rather, extended rehearsal sessions that just happened to include people who weren’t in his band.

Zappa’s standoffish demeanor held firm no matter the level of underground fame that his hard-to-categorize music began accruing in the hippie era. In 1967, he played a grueling six-month stint in New York with his band, the Mothers of Invention, for crowds of frequently returning fans. His sonic circus mash-up of R&B funk, satirical skits, warped doo-wop, and atonal kazoo-inflected fuckery made little sense to the broader public, but it clicked for a certain quadrant of longhairs. Nevertheless, Zappa held those fans at a distance, insisting that “hippies did not like us” and “a lot of what we do is designed to annoy people.”

Ironically, Zappa’s 1966 debut album with the Mothers of Invention, Freak Out!, became such a soundtrack for the freak scene that when he guested on Saturday Night Live 10 years later, one skit featured hippies (played by Dan Aykroyd, Laraine Newman, and John Belushi) having their minds blown by the fact that Zappa, a teetotaler, recorded it sober. Years later, the ever-annoyed Zappa called the skit “stupid,” as though eager to bite the hand that fed him. The joke in all this was that he was less freak than control freak. At one point, Alice Cooper—a Zappa protégé—says that “Frank sabotaged” himself in order to avoid having a hit record.

Fittingly for an icon with such conflicted feelings about his status, the documentary is determined not to be a typical rock-god story with predictable rise-and-fall arcs. Not so much filmed as compiled, Zappa is a flickering mash-up of juddering home movies, concert footage, monster flicks, and animation culled from Zappa’s archive. Instead of encomiums about his greatness from rock journalists, the loving yet often frustrated-sounding interviews are with band members, friends, family, and the odd hanger-on (like queen groupie Pamela Des Barres, who describes the parade of icons from the Rolling Stones to David Bowie who trekked to Zappa’s Laurel Canyon home to commune with one of the era’s trailblazers). There’s also plenty of material featuring Zappa himself, compiled from the apparently endless hours that he spent talking to the media that he treated with a cheery brand of contempt.

Zappa’s emotional remove is a running theme throughout the documentary. One clip mentions how after he discovered electronics in the 1980s, he celebrated their utility by complaining, “Human beings are expensive.” But the film’s overall take on Zappa is that of a perfectionist whose artistry was devoted to one thing: compulsively rehearsing and replaying a piece until it sounded exactly like it did in his head. Onetime Zappa guitarist Steve Vai, a surprisingly professorial presence, calls his former boss “a slave to his inner ear.” A subtle testament to his legacy is the number of colleagues who acknowledge here the difficulties of working with him while making clear that they think it was all worth it.

Zappa follows a mostly chronological format, though in somewhat impressionistic fashion. Its overall theme isn’t so much that Zappa never got his due, but that he wanted to be some combination of Edgard Varese and Spike Jones. While that case is generally well argued, Winter doesn’t insist on seeing everything Zappa did in his often-inexplicable career as relating to his being a composer. Other sections in the film dealing with some of the more unexpected aspects of his later life, from leading the charge against the Parents Music Resource Council (PMRC) and railing against the monocultural flattening that MTV caused in music in the 1980s to becoming a trade ambassador for Czechoslovakia soon after the Iron Curtain disintegrated, are presented without the need to make sense of them.

A richly three-dimensional portrait, Zappa manages to be at once impressed by Zappa’s talent and aware of his being a pain in the ass, while not limited by those perceptions. “It won’t be perfection,” Zappa tells an eager 1991 audience in the first scene of the documentary, knowing that he is somewhat rusty after years away from the stage. “It’ll just be music.”