In "Dream of Life," Patti Smith hints at her obsession with "Don't Look Back," saying she spent months trying to hail a cab like Dylan.

"Dream of Life" can reasonably be seen as Smith's "Don't Look Back," as fashion photographer/filmmaker Steven Sebring opts for a similar black and white cinema verite style as D.A. Pennebaker's Dylan documentary.

This film captures not a cocky young folk-poet, but a darker punk-poet, now 61, who has lived through so much more, including a music career interrupted by motherhood and the loss of her husband, Fred "Sonic" Smith.

"Dream of Life" lacks the narrative thrust of "Don't Look Back," which chronicled Dylan's own British invasion, but there's no shortage of drama with Patti Smith, who rarely allows you to take her lightly and is capable of staring holes into the camera.

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'Patti Smith: Dream of Life'

3 stars = Good
Ratings explained

• Rating: Unrated but adult for language
• Web site: dreamoflifethemovie.com

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If there's any thread, "Dream" is something of a graveyard tour, as she visits the final resting places of William Blake, Gregory Corso and Arthur Rimbaud. She reads poetry, ponders mortality, spins on the beach in a black suit, shares a Jackson Pollock story as she paints an abstract and actually shows us the remains of Robert Mapplethorpe.

In lighter moments, we see her interact with her two kids, Jackson and Jesse, and return to her family home, where she calls her father "Daddy" and tells her mom, who collects cow knick-knacks, "only for you would I do a medley." There's also a funny scene on the beach with Flea, where they talk of their talents for discreetly urinating in bottles.

Smith is no less intense than she was when she came on the national scene in 1974 at 28, which is mostly DNA, but George W. Bush is partly to thank for that. She spews a poetic diatribe against the outgoing president ("We indict George W. Bush ... for using the rhetoric of freedom to justify tyranny") with such anger she literally froths at the mouth.

"Dream of Life" is interspersed with intense concert footage, including "Gloria" and "Rock and Roll N-----," but there are no complete songs, which is sure to frustrate viewers.

Smith says at one point, "Life isn't some vertical or horizontal line, you have your own interior world and it's not neat." Perhaps that was the basis for Sebring's "Dream of Life," which easily could have told a story but chose to go in circles with Patti.

Opens Friday at the Harris Theater.