Zappa is an excellent exploration into the stern, eccentric ways of Frank Zappa and his pursuit for musical perfection.

Frank Zappa was the kind of unique, uncompromising soul that we don’t see anymore. An artist of dogged workmanship, he released 62 albums in his lifetime that defied genre and contemporary, creating a cult-like fanbase in the process. While his forays into the mainstream were brief, there is no denying Zappa’s impact and legacy, which director Alex Winter (Deep Web) captures in one of the better rock biography documentaries out there in a very crowded marketplace.

With Frank Zappa himself playing narrator through the use of archived clips, Zappa lays out the musician’s legacy as not only a prolific creative force, but a social provocateur who fought against agents of conformity and conservatism until his last breath. It also brilliantly conveys Zappa’s standing as a contrarian in many respects, as he often lauded the ideas of capitalism and ownership, not to mention a vehement anti-drug stance went against the grain of his “freak out” image. As one interview said, Zappa was a “walking mass of contradictions”, but “persistent in those contradictions.”

Winter presents Zappa’s story in proper chronological birth-to-death order, yet true to the spirit of his subject, he isn’t afraid to add a suitably odd, eccentric visual approach to the whole affair. Winter scored a big coup in gaining access to Zappa’s personal vault of mostly never seen before material, and from the inclusion of this material does Zappa’s silly, quirky, musical theatre meets vaudeville approach to his craft shine through.

And there is the music, without compromise or category the product of a composers inventive, perfectionist mind, and performed by a revolving door of musicians who marched to Zappa’s peculiar beat. For the uninitiated it is the perfect gateway into Zappa’s eclectic compositions, ranging from the ‘60s tinged “Motherly Love”, to the ‘80s hard rocking satire “Valley Girl.”

Zappa gives us an insight into an uncompromising soul, who not only did it his way, but gladly suffered for his work while doing so. If anything, the film should inspire an appreciation for what it takes to become an original voice in the very conformist music industry.