Underground icon Jack Smith is famous — or is that infamous? — for a 1963 film that was a free-speech lightning rod in its day but is rarely screened anymore. His 43-minute “Flaming Creatures” was an orgiastic hallucination in deliberately overexposed black-and-white that might single-handedly have heralded the cultural, social, and sexual tumult of the 1960s. It must have, because it was seized by the New York Police Department at its premiere, banned by the city on the grounds of obscenity, and eventually had its artistic merits considered by the United States Supreme Court.

Glimpsed now, the film retains its surreal beauty and gender-bent melodrama, offering a world of uncontrollable sexual energy where women and transvestites pose, dance, love, and sometimes assault one another. Today, of course, for all its once-shocking power, its fleshy ruckus could pass for a Saturday afternoon at the Burning Man festival.

Such is cultural process. What once were vices are now habits. And Smith, a penniless visionary in the purest sense, was a fountain of transgressive ideas that generations of artists have tapped for their own work. Many of them appear as talking heads in director Mary Jordan’s crisp documentary, “Jack Smith and the Destruction of Atlantis,” which makes use of materials from the Smith archive to create a unique collage of the performer and filmmaker’s mostly unfinished efforts.

Significantly, there are excerpts from Smith’s abortive “Normal Love,” which was to be the color follow-up up to “Creatures” but was abandoned amid the filmmaker’s always self-destructive whims. Federico Fellini saw some of it and appropriated its extravagance for his own “Satyricon.”

“Atlantis” is winningly done, the patchwork nature of its rags-to-rags saga animated by the sound of Smith’s own voice, which hovers as a slightly unearthly narrator speaking in a wobbly falsetto. It’s accompanied by largely sympathetic comments from a parade of better-fed acolytes from various avant-gardes — Robert Wilson, John Zorn, Richard Foreman, John Waters, Mike Kelley — who pay homage and often recount some of Smith’s more outrageous idiosyncrasies. As an artist, Smith was more invested in process than posterity, repeatedly cutting himself off from any chance at wider exposure or financial gain.

One extended anecdote makes this clear. After deciding to stage a one-man show at his apartment, Smith invited friends and sold tickets, but rarely performed at the appointed curtain time. Instead, he would hours until everyone got fed up and left, however long it took, and then play to an empty house. The point, somewhere in there, was that it was all performance, but the gesture is symbolic of Smith’s approach to art and life (between which there was a scarce demarcation).

The upside of this is that when Smith died of AIDS in 1989, dreaming of his beloved B-movie heroine Maria Montez in queenly repose, he left behind a lot of documentation. (Two volumes of recordings of Smith, made by his onetime Ludlow Street roommate, the composer Tony Conrad, between 1962 and 1964, were released in 2001 on Conrad’s Audio Artkive label, and Smith has been the subject of a retrospective at P.S. 1 and in several books).

As befits such a protean character, much of Smith’s influence was generated by other artists who fell in thrall to his raffish, costumed flair and indefatigable passion, best described by his two favorite adjectives: raging and burning. Andy Warhol adopted Smith — and his concepts — for his adventures in underground filmmaking, until the pair had a falling out. And early on, Smith became a figurehead in the American independent cinema movement for his roles in Ron Rice’s “The Queen of Sheba vs. the Atom Man” and Ken Jacobs’s “Blonde Cobra” and “Star Spangled to Death,” in which Smith, armed with a mop, portrayed a kind of Lower East Side zeitgeist, “the spirit not of life but of living.”

Smith’s fascination with fantasy realms began in childhood. As a gay 6-year-old ostracized by his mother, he would retreat into the matinee exotica of films like Robert Siodmak’s 1944 “Cobra Woman.” As an adult, he transposed these hothouse camp tableaux into luminous celebrations of ritual and cross-dressing pomp, with a stray flaccid penis and exposed breast or two, and a pretty Puerto Rican drag queen he anointed Mario Montez in honor of his boyhood idol.

Mr. Montez makes a comeback for “Atlantis,” once again garbed in drag — for the first time in decades — as do other blasts from the past, including several Warhol “superstars.” All in all, it’s a grand evocation of a bohemian New York that might seem to be long gone, yet proves to be ever resilient, like a daisy pushing up through the concrete.

Through April 24 (209 W. Houston St., between Sixth Avenue and Varick Street, 212-727-8110).