He’s free. He’s not a person living a nightmarish life with ghosts in the closet coming to get him. The last few years he was alive, thinking about him was too painful… it would make me cry at the drop of a hat. After he died, what was really beautiful was that, slowly, when I allowed myself time to think about him, the good stuff started floating back. Eventually I was just flooded with happy, good stuff.

That’s the musician Jon Brion talking about his friend, the late singer-songwriter Elliott Smith, in an interview with another of Smith’s friends, the photographer Autumn de Wilde. Brion’s sentiment is wonderfully encapsulated in a new film about Smith’s life, Nickolas Rossi’s Heaven Adores You. That is to say, it’s suffused with a whole heap of happy, good stuff — an unexpected angle, perhaps, for a film about someone who died, probably from suicide and certainly in a lot of psychic and physical pain, at only 34.

To come to Smith’s music after his death is to necessarily interpret it as if almost all of it were made under a heavy, soot-black cloud of depression, alcoholism, and drug addiction. Going by his lyrics alone, it’s a fairly logical conclusion to make — but, as Rossi’s documentary shows, it’s not the whole truth. The film builds a wonderful portrait of the singer using mostly his own words (from archival interviews), embellished and contextualised beautifully by contemporary interviewees. It opens in 1998, after Smith was nominated for an Oscar for “Miss Misery,” which appeared in Gus van Sant’s Good Will Hunting. Smith was weirded-out by the newfound fame that came with being nominated, and more than a little annoyed by its side effects, which included being asked the same bad questions over and over about whether he only played dive bars and coffee shops. Over the next five years, the last of his life, he would only become more famous, more quickly recognised, and ultimately less happy. It was a fruitful period artistically, but also a time of personal trauma and mental anguish.

Refreshingly, in painting its portrait of Smith, Heaven Adores You isn’t beholden to this period. Aside from a small, touching mention of the posthumously released compilation From a Basement on a Hill, the film’s foundation is Smith’s pre-solo work, particularly with Heatmiser, the band he was best known for in 1994, when his début solo album, Roman Candle, was released. The film tracks Smith’s upbringing in Texas, and his move, at age 14, to live in Portland, Oregon, the city whose culture and mood he’s most closely associated with. The music scene in Portland in the late ’80s and early ’90s was, it turns out, not dissimilar to what was just a bit further up the coast in Seattle — it just wasn’t nearly as well-known.

What Rossi’s film reveals about Smith — and this aligns with Brion’s sentiment about all those happy memories — is that, in these early years, before he turned to a more intimate acoustic style, he absolutely loved being part of the punk scene. In video shot by friends and fellow-musicians, Smith’s wisecracking personality shines through, as does his deep empathy and the thrill he felt at performing for people. Jon Brion and Autumn de Wilde are two of the film’s more prominent interviewees. They appear alongside many of Smith’s former bandmates, engineers, critics and admirers who collectively make the film an uncomplicated, poignant and moving celebration.

After chronicling Smith’s pre- and post-Oscars career, including a segment from a wonderful performance captured by Paul Thomas Anderson in 2000, Heaven Adores You closes with a montage of a series of tribute concerts by friends and fellow musicians, all singing “Happiness,” one of Smith’s more lyrically and musically upbeat numbers — and one built for a sing-along. As the song’s last lines — “All I want now / is happiness for you and me…” — are passed from one performer to the next, and from stage to stage, Smith’s music is brought to life again, and we can be assured that, wherever he is now, he feels much, much better.

Heaven Adores You (2014)D: Nickolas RossiScreening at the Documentary Edge Festival Wellington from June 6-June 14For tickets, go here