We could argue forever over which band wrote the first punk song, but let’s not mince words about one thing: It was the Stooges who pioneered the punk performance. Iggy Pop stomped and writhed onstage like he’d just swallowed a live snake, rocking a dog collar years before Malcolm McLaren thought to package music, nihilism, and fetish gear as a new youth subculture. His naked chest got smeared with peanut butter and pierced by shards of glass. Sometimes he fell face-first into the crowd. And then there were the nights when he was too fucked up to see straight but fought his way through a set anyway.

There are so many vivid anecdotes associated with the Stooges’ few years of underground fame in the late ’60s and early ’70s that even casual fans can rattle off their origin story. They lived in a falling-down house in Detroit, opened for the MC5, and consumed a series of increasingly dangerous drugs. Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain’s classic punk oral history Please Kill Me recounted some of Iggy’s wildest moments, along with that time Stooges drummer Scott Asheton drove a truck full of gear under a low bridge and ripped its roof clear off. But Jim Jarmusch’s new documentary *Gimme Danger *gives even those of us who pored over that book something we didn’t realize we were missing: an anatomy of the Stooges’ sound and Iggy’s stage persona.

Maybe it’s taken so long to complete the historical record because it seemed impossible, or simply beside the point, to intellectualize music that was so rooted in Iggy’s remarkable body. Even at the Stooges’ 21st-century reunion shows, he was like a frayed, leathery wire, zapping electricity into the crowd with every seemingly uncontrollable gyration. It would’ve been a disappointment to visit him in the green room half an hour after the venue cleared out and find he wasn’t still vibrating.

There is also a deeply cerebral side to Iggy, though, one that he’s never tried to hide. This is a man who named one solo album after Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot and took inspiration for another, 2009’s Préliminaires, from a Michel Houellebecq novel. A few years ago he delivered a brilliant John Peel lecture on “free music in a capitalist society.” But his long-standing resistance to attempts at untangling the primal Iggy Pop persona from his core self, the “real” James Osterberg, has made it impossible to reconcile the two extremes of his personality.

Pop’s old friend Jarmusch, a fellow musician who cast Iggy insightfully in his films Dead Man and Coffee and Cigarettes, gets closer to making his halves cohere than any other reporter to date. And Gimme Danger is, first and foremost, an act of journalism—not the kind of high-concept profile you’d expect from a fiercely independent filmmaker whose work often favors free-form philosophizing over straightforward storytelling. Like a standard rock doc, it offers archival photos and performance footage and interviews, new and old, with many important characters from the band’s story. A few of their colorful anecdotes merit the same kind of funny, surreal animated sequences that served Brett Morgen well in Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck, for which Jarmusch enlisted James Kerr of Scorpion Dagger fame. Clips from saccharine mid-century TV shows subtly illustrate how shocking the Stooges were when they emerged in the late ’60s, while B-movie montages evoke punk’s love of trash culture.