“Eat That Question: Frank Zappa in His Own Words”

Not rated. (1:30)

****

Not to put too fine a point on it, but Frank Zappa, the fiercely idiosyncratic musician and composer, hated being interviewed.

“It’s one of the most abnormal things you can do to anyone, two steps removed from the Inquisition,” he once said with typical brio, adding, “I don’t think anyone has ever seen the real Frank Zappa.”

Given that, the question is how did director Thorsten Schutte, a veteran German documentarian, turn “Eat That Question: Frank Zappa in His Own Words” into such an absorbing experience? One key to the film’s involving narrative is that that title turns out to be a bit misleading.

“Eat That Question” contains no third-party testimony, just the subject himself. But in this film, we hear a good deal from the people asking on-camera questions. Watching the evolution of the ways journalists interacted with the man tells us a lot about the shifting nature of public perceptions as well as Zappa himself.

Tall, whippet thin, with unruly hair, a formidable mustache and a Mephistophelian air, Zappa (who died of prostate cancer in 1993 at age 52) was an intimidating person. He didn’t suffer fools gladly, and he also gave the impression of not suffering anyone at all.

Plus, there was his music. Initially, all anyone talked to Zappa about was the rock repertory he performed with the Mothers of Invention, songs that often featured biting social criticism and lyrics too blistering to play on the radio.

Perhaps, as a result, journalists savaged him (“a force of cultural darkness,” said Time magazine), and unnerved interviewers inevitably gave him a hard time in the nicest possible way, with one man insisting (really) that the musician had somehow betrayed the ideals of the hippie movement because of his musical success.

“I was always a freak, never a hippie,” Zappa said in reply, and that answer was typical of his unflappability, no matter what was thrown at him.

With sarcasm never far from his lips, Zappa took on fans who liked only his earlier albums (“I hate to see anyone with a closed mind on any subject”) and what he saw as America’s cultural lassitude (“We are culturally nothing. We are only interested in the bottom line”).

Director Schutte worked for eight years on this project, made in association with the Zappa Family Trust. Much of that time was spent tracking down all manner of filmed material, which the director describes as “sniffing out Zappa truffles.” Among the unexpected items are a clip of a short-haired 22-year-old Zappa playing “Concerto for Two Bicycles” with a bemused Steve Allen and a quite serious interview with a uniformed Pennsylvania state trooper.

“In His Own Words” does have some small irritations. Zappa’s interviewers are rarely identified, the passage of time is acknowledged only by the graying of Zappa’s sideburns, and though there is a lot of his music in the film, the documentary does not help you with the song titles.

Though Zappa remained resolutely himself from start to finish, journalists became increasingly aware of other aspects of his musical personality, including the avant-garde classical material he’d written since high school, music that was treated with respect in Europe.

As a result, Zappa came to be treated as a beloved cult figure, not a pariah. Some of the most moving material in “Eat That Question” comes near the end, when Czech TV shows him getting a hero’s welcome during a 1990 state visit to President Vaclav Havel.

The film’s final interview is with the “Today” program’s Jamie Gangel, talking to a visibly ill Zappa just a few months before he died. Irascible to the end, he told her that he was “totally unrepentant,” and said that being remembered was “not important.” If this labor-of-love portrait is any indication, Frank Zappa will not be forgotten any time soon.