The ambitious two-week run of “Patti Smith: Dream of Life,” beginning today at Film Forum, banks on the unconventional documentary’s appeal to different audiences. For fans, it’s a righteous, heartfelt trip through the mind of an icon and inspirational force. For the many bystanders who appreciate Ms. Smith’s important place in music history, it’s a ruminative reminder from the woman herself of a larger literary context beyond being a “rock poet.”

But for less invested viewers, the film hangs on whether Ms. Smith’s ardor and disarmingly affectionate manner can hold the film’s time-shuffling, associative style together. Shot between 1996 and 2007, “Dream of Life” is given over to the artist and her passions, which are followed through her solemn voice-over, vérité footage, and performances. Rather than operating with a standard chronology, the film is rooted in an especially reflective period following the deaths of Ms. Smith’s husband, the musician Fred “Sonic” Smith, in 1994, her brother, Todd, shortly thereafter, and of close associate Robert Mapplethorpe some years before.

So while we get a glimpse of Ms. Smith, now 61, as a hungry young poet in 1970s New York (where you can be “created or destroyed,” and that’s a good thing), most of the film consists of recent wanderings and musings intimately recorded by first-time documentarian Steven Sebring’s 16-millimeter camera. Ms. Smith is shown hanging out with her extended artistic family, comprising such friends as Lenny Kaye, Sam Shepard, and Flea, as well as her teenage son and daughter. Signature songs such as “Horses” and “Gloria” (the near-anthems from her John Cale-produced 1975 debut album) appear via recent concert footage from around the world.

The past is always present for Ms. Smith, whose friendly openness offsets that familiar wraithlike, pilgrim’s-aunt appearance of severe facial features and long black coats. Through “Dream of Life,” she situates herself not as the primal “godmother of punk,” as she’s been dubbed, but in a longer poetic tradition spanning Blake, Rimbaud, Whitman, Burroughs, Ginsberg, and the oft-invoked Bob Dylan. In her often literally foaming-at-the-mouth performances and her visits to graves, there’s a mystical, dervish-like quality to her questing engagement.

The twinning of contemplation and community lends an immediacy to Ms. Smith’s thematic concerns, instead of constructing an ineffable star mystique like the one forwarded in D.A. Pennebaker’s 1967 documentary about Bob Dylan, “Dont Look Back,” which she recalls with humorous precision in a London hotel room. The populist fervor of an anti-Bush protest song exists alongside the intimacy of visits with her parents in New Jersey, holding hands with her father, or puttering about in a knickknack-strewn room of her old home outside Detroit. In the film’s surprisingly seamless weaving of several years, there sometimes emerges the lovely timeless sense of existence.

But at the same time, Mr. Sebring, no doubt hyperconscious of his exceptional access, adopts Ms. Smith’s self-conception wholesale. No matter how far her reach, a certain lack of perspective leads to something of an echo chamber, especially with an artist prone to meditation and unafraid of declaiming. “Dream of Life” also seems to miss the opportunity for a nuanced look that more than 10 years’ worth of footage might yield. For every aperçu (such as Ms. Smith’s explication of Jackson Pollock via Picasso’s “Guernica”) or candid moment of camaraderie, there are repetitive, incantatory stretches that weigh down an already challenging presentation.

Inasmuch as “Patti Smith: Dream of Life” works, its mechanics must surely owe a lot to the veteran editor Angela Corrao, who also assembled Bruce Weber’s 1988 Chet Baker film “Let’s Get Lost” (which was re-released last summer at Film Forum). Despite the groan-worthy opening of a red-tinted shot of horses mid-gallop (shortly followed by a static-snowy TV set), Ms. Corrao and Mr. Sebring, a former fashion photographer, create a workable, if not fundamentally inquisitive, structure that at the very least is a departure from the typical music documentary.

Through August 19 (209 W. Houston St., between Sixth Avenue and Varick Street, 212-727-8110).