‘Zappa’ Review: Alex Winter’s Documentary Hauntingly Captures the Skewed Passion of Frank Zappa, a One-of-a-Kind Rock Legend

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Alex Winter's Zappa finds an emotional through line by taking Frank Zappa as seriously as he took himself

, and he loomed large in your youth-cultural pop rebel sandbox , he seemed to be many things at once. The outrageous hippie with the thick black T-shaped goatee who looked weird and threatening enough to represent something very far removed from peace and love. The avant rock ‘n’ roll absurdist who led the band of wilted flower children known as the Mothers of Invention. The scandalous joker seated half-naked on a toilet seat in the iconic ’60s poster that read “Phi Zappa Krappa.

Zappa’s greatest contradiction is that he sought a purity of connection with his audience, yet when he thought about “the audience” , his instinct was to figure out a way to spit in their eye. Winter traces that love-hate quality back to the moment when Zappa discovered Edgard Varèse, the French-born 20th-century composer who created churning cacophonies of sound.

Underwood tells a great story about going back to Juilliard and trying to play “Oh No” on one of the practice-room pianos . “If you were to hear that piece on a piano,” she says, “it could live in a concert hall. But you couldn’t really categorize it. You couldn’t say ‘Oh, yeah, that’s rock ‘n’ roll,’ because it wasn’t. ‘It’s jazz!’ No, it really wasn’t. ‘It’s pop music!’ No, not at all. ‘Well, what the hell is it?’ It’s.” That’s as perfect a description as I’ve heard.

Yet he was singularly charismatic. I used to think that if they made a Zappa biopic, the actor to play him would have been Jon Hamm. In the interview clips we see, Zappa speaks with a forceful, sonorous low-voiced directness that was his way of cutting through the crappola of American culture, but he also exuded a twinkling warmth.

 

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