Aggressive metal furniture by the designer Paul Evans is not easy to categorize.

“His work is stunningly beautiful, stunningly ugly, stunningly tacky, stunningly sophisticated,” the performer Lenny Kravitz, who collects Evans pieces, says in a new documentary. The film will play at the first major Evans retrospective, which opens on March 1 at the Michener Art Museum in Doylestown, Pa.

In the show, “Paul Evans: Crossing Boundaries and Crafting Modernism,” and its catalog (from Arnoldsche), the designer comes across as gregarious, inventive, tireless and troubled.

His showrooms and workshops in and around New Hope, Pa., let customers see just a few rough sketches of their orders in advance. His manufacturing techniques sometimes emitted toxic fumes and had to be abandoned. His short-lived Manhattan branch called the Think Tank was a costly failure. The day after he retired, in 1987, at 55, he suffered a fatal heart attack.

“In the end,” his former assistant manager Wink Nessa says in the film, “there was too much drinking and not enough attention paid to the shop.” She adds, “His demons toward the end became too great.”