For the bulk of her career, the late Anita O’Day (1919-2006) described herself, quite accurately, as a “song stylist” rather than just a jazz vocalist. Not surprisingly, then, the central sequence in “Anita O’Day: The Life of a Jazz Singer,” which makes its premiere Friday at Cinema Village, is a performance.

In 1958, O’Day was invited to appear at the Newport Jazz Festival — the same year that filmmakers Bert Stern and Aram Avakian were asked to document what was then the fifth annual seaside gathering of musicians and fans in Rhode Island. In an excerpt from Messrs. Stern and Avakian’s resulting film, “Jazz on a Summer’s Day,” O’Day, accustomed only to singing indoors and at night, takes the stage in the afternoon sun.

Once at the microphone, O’Day wraps her husky yet ethereal voice around a narcotic, velveteen arrangement of the usually unrelentingly bubbly Dixieland jazz standard “Sweet Georgia Brown.” As O’Day plays with and against the arrangement, maximizing each rhythmic opportunity and toeing every precarious tonal foothold, the camera strikes up a kind of oblique visual counterpoint that doesn’t so much document the song as gild the music to near audiovisual perfection. Framed primarily in Mr. Stern’s tight profile and bathed in an eerie mixture of stage light and daylight, O’Day’s alternately jagged and yogurt-smooth voice and subtly aggressive, unapologetically presentational stage demeanor surpass every other performance in the film. Even though she is shod in glass slippers and clad in a sleek black dress and a manhole-sized hat purchased on a whim the day before, in “Jazz on a Summer’s Day,” Anita O’Day is as confrontational as they come.

“That was the big event,” O’Day recalls decades later in “The Life of a Jazz Singer,” Robbie Cavolina and Ian McCrudden’s documentary attempt at compiling a fuller collection of defining moments in the artist’s life. O’Day goes on to explain in this late-life interview — which was shot by Messrs. Cavolina and McCrudden in an economical, low-resolution digital-video format that is the visual opposite of the luminous 35 mm images from Newport — that when she took that stage, “I didn’t even know they were filming.” In 1958, O’Day was both at the height of her career and in the midst of a 16-year heroin addiction. On that particular summer afternoon, the singer was so chemically insulated from reality that she wasn’t aware of any of the five motion-picture cameras that were all trained on her at once.

The personal saga retold in “Anita O’Day: The Life of a Jazz Singer” is a dark one even by the grim standards of jazz biographies. Born in Chicago to a philandering alcoholic father and a God-fearing mother, O’Day notes in the film that her few bright family moments were accompanied by music when “my mother played piano, my father drank beer, and we’d get a harmony going.” Once out of the house and on the road, the former Anita Belle Colton gave herself a surname appropriate to her empty pockets and the slang of the day. O’Day, the film divulges, is pig Latin for “dough.”

The singer’s remarkable, rhythmically aggressive musical diction (one peer recalls O’Day mercilessly racing and beating piano great Oscar Peterson to the end of a song, as if they were in a track meet) is a by-product, she says, of the accidental loss, via a bungled tonsillectomy, of the vocal tools necessary to physically sustain vibrato. O’Day’s gritty alto made her a pioneering instrumental soloist instead of a crooning, warbling accompanist, like so many other “canaries” of the swing era. As the lead vocalist with Gene Krupa’s orchestra, she insisted on wearing the same band jackets as the rest of the all-male group rather than a ball gown or equivalent finery, making O’Day’s live appearances with Krupa de facto acts of feminist emancipation.

“Anita O’Day: The Life of a Jazz Singer” knits together these and many more unvarnished autobiographical observations and discoveries with such a fannish repetitiveness and meandering chronology that it succeeds as neither a factual chronicle nor a narrative journey. Personal testimonials from music critics and writers (including The New York Sun’s always camera-friendly and reliably perceptive Will Friedwald) duke it out for screen time with O’Day’s musical and club-life contemporaries. Unfortunately, the barrage of accolades is so uniformly positive and the sluice of memories so identically appreciative and forgiving that the film assumes a retirement-dinner testimonial monotony that is at odds with O’Day’s picaresque personal history and off-kilter bandstand charisma.

The filmmakers are also unable to resist interjecting praise into archival performances. “There was a sense of f— you about it,” the filmmaker John Cameron Mitchell observes a few bars into a vintage black-and-white live television clip of O’Day as she willfully pares an orchestra down to a trio with spectacular results. Mr. Mitchell’s words, true as they are, do nothing to add to the moment — nor does the inclusion of his face, framed, as are many of the talking heads on display, by a colorful computer graphic marquee that lists the writer, director, and actor’s own accomplishments. Like much of the filmmaking in “Anita O’Day: The Life of a Jazz Singer,” this interruption, and an accompanying post-production choice to digitally tint the remainder of the clip in monochromatic blue, inadvertently downgrade an electrifying jolt of NC-17 intensity to a low-wattage G-rated spark of nostalgia.