“Who cares what you say about people, anyway?” shrugged Marlene Dietrich’s world-weary hostess, Tanya, over the fresh corpse of rogue cop Hank Quinlan at the end of Orson Welles’s 1958 B-movie masterpiece “Touch of Evil.” Tanya’s anti-epitaph is particularly apt when applied to movie biographies about cult musicians. The highly subjective ear-of-the-beholder interpretive doors that visionary musicians open sometimes get slammed shut by the single-minded point of view of the documentary filmmaker.

If ever there were a tough sell as the subject for a comprehensive documentary, it would be the life and work of the late tenor saxophone player Albert Ayler. Just 34 when his body was discovered floating in the East River in 1970, Ayler composed and performed with such ferocious and incendiary iconoclasm and dizzying impatience with conventional tonality, tempo, and melody that his music still instantly polarizes the uninitiated. For some, Ayler’s sound lies inaccessibly beyond the border separating listenable jazz experimentation from unlistenable abstraction. For others, his fearless, skillful, and soulfully ecstatic rending of expectation is one of the most profoundly affecting musical experiences available. Prolonged exposure to his potent early 1960s Scandinavian recordings and to subsequent releases on the ESP and Impulse! labels can be so transformative that ordinary melodic music begins to seem perverse and abrasive by comparison. Kasper Collin’s 2005 film, “My Name Is Albert Ayler,” which makes its American premiere with a week-long run beginning tomorrow at Anthology Film Archives, is unlikely to change anyone’s mind about the accessibility of Ayler’s sonic vision. But Mr. Collin’s film skillfully engages the facts, personalities, and sounds of Ayler’s relentlessly visionary life with such an astute combination of ardent affection and sensitive journalistic equipoise that it puts most latter-day documentaries about cult musicians to shame.

“The real blues, the new blues,” Ayler said when describing the jaggedly primal work that simultaneously sent jazz back to the pre-Louis Armstrong Stone Age and catapulted it into a complex future. If, as musicologists tell us, the authenticity of blues music is in direct proportion to the conflicts and deprivations endured by its performers, then Ayler’s qualifications were legion. Born in Cleveland in 1936, Ayler was schooled in both Bible studies and the saxophone by his father, and in the perils of apron-string entanglement by his highly protective and eventually invalid mother.

After a stint in an Army band and a fruitless search for kindred musical spirits inside the West Coast jazz scene of the late ’50s, Ayler moved to Sweden and met free-jazz standard-bearer Cecil Taylor, as well as Mr. Taylor’s sideman and drummer, Sunny Murray. Following the growing acceptance of “the new sound” championed by Mr. Taylor, John Coltrane, and others, Ayler arrived in New York, where his work with Mr. Murray and the bassist Gary Peacock became a bellwether of how far music could stray from the orthodoxy of controlled theme-bound improvisation.

Steeped in early country blues, New Orleans second-line marches, gospel church music, and rural Southern field hollers, Ayler evoked with savage eloquence both the restless ghosts of black musical traditions and the hardships that spawned them. It’s fitting, then, that the most powerful voice (and sole narrator) in Mr. Collin’s film is that of Ayler himself. Through a series of taped interviews conducted throughout his playing career, Ayler holds forth from beyond the grave about a future when his music and the positive force it represented for the man creating it would at last be understood and accepted. During the course of “My Name Is Albert Ayler,” Ayler’s speech proves as emphatic and articulate as his playing — so much so that Mr. Murray admits in an interview that he successfully co-opted Ayler’s singular style of intellectual discourse to pick up girls.

Over his mother’s strenuous objections and his sidemen’s doubts, Ayler added his trumpet-playing brother, Donald, into the volatile mix. Donald’s extra layer of unbound intuitive tonal relentlessness helped Albert to further redraw the musical map. But Donald’s ebbing sanity brought additional stress to what was already a musical enterprise hamstrung by a lack of commercial success. “The artist’s life is very hard,” Ayler says in voice-over with a smooth, emphatic seductiveness. In interviews today, Donald Ayler’s speech has the slow, halting drift of a man who has been on antipsychotic medication for decades. Verbally anyway, it seems that Donald is still playing counterpoint to his brother.

“It’s a sad picture,” offers an apparent co-resident of the managed-care facility in which Donald now resides. “My Name Is Albert Ayler” contains many such pictures. A framing sequence in which Ayler’s 90-year-old father searches for his son’s grave marker is particularly heartbreaking. But Albert’s ear-boggling legacy is best illustrated in dark, ironic tones, and Mr. Collin’s film proves more than equal to the task.

Through November 14 (32 Second Ave., between 1st and 2nd streets, 212-505-5181).