The perfect images for a unique musician

Tom Lee in a scene from "Wild Combination."

A shortcoming of many documentary portraits of artists is that, while they manage to wrangle insights from the artists' friends and collaborators, they don't capture, in equivalent cinematic terms, the artists' art. "Wild Combination: A Portrait of Arthur Russell" doesn't have that problem.

Not only does director Matt Wolf hear the baleful beauty in Russell's music, he matches it with passenger-seat tracking shots of empty fields and cloudless skies, and with shots of, say, a record-player arm rising with the steady undulations of a spinning LP (moving at about 33 rpm).

The first set of images is unexpectedly lonely. The other is sensual. And both get amazingly close to capturing the strange emotional essence of Russell's music - cello, drum loops, and his bashful vocals ricocheting against various backdrops of sonic detritus. Russell died of AIDS in 1992. He was 40, and for most of the 1980s, until his death, he was making the saddest dance music in the world. Almost nobody had heard it, of course, except other musicians, his pals, and his boyfriend Tom Lee.

In the spring of 2004, a New York label called Audika released "Calling Out of Context," a kind of Russell sampler. (One of the best is called "Wild Combination.") If there was justice in this music's release, it was merely poetic, since Russell was no longer around to make more. In exploring Russell's life, Wolf's documentary convinces you that Russell's experimentalism was scratching at the mass market's door.

Russell was born and raised in Oskaloosa, Iowa. He was mocked for being quiet and thoughtful. His parents, kind heartland folks, explain that he changed his name to Arthur because he hated being called "Chuck Junior" (his father is Chuck Senior), how acne made Arthur self-conscious, and how Arthur ran off to San Francisco and befriended Allen Ginsberg in 1967 after a fight with Chuck Senior.

Russell loved John Cage, but he liked disco and rock, too. The music he eventually wrote and recorded dramatized the tensions between frothy intelligence and intelligent froth. He'd bridged the canyon between Radiohead and Madonna before there was officially a Radiohead or Madonna to bridge - the perils of being ahead of one's time. Some of his work is folk. Some of it sounds like he wanted to be Grand Master Flash.

Russell haunts "Wild Combination" like a kind of ghost. Everyone who knew him - be it Philip Glass or Russell's former partner Tom Lee - fills in some of the blanks. But as you might expect, Russell is alive in the music, which toward the end of his life was changing incrementally but significantly. The joy in pop music was learning to cohabitate with the seriousness of avant-gardism.

For this, Wolf summons the remarkable sight of blurry fireworks. It's the perfect image for a man whose vivid music appeared to be fighting its way into sharper focus.

Wesley Morris can be reached at wmorris@globe.com. For more on movies, go to www.boston.com/movienation.