At the beginning of Andrew Neel's documentary about his grandmother, the painter Alice Neel, a stiff man in a business suit describes his resentment toward bohemians. That's Alice Neel's right-wing, Nixon-loving, lawyer son, the subject of one of her particularly piercing portraits. Her other son (the father of the filmmaker) is a sophisticated doctor harboring an array of barely bandaged emotional wounds. Her other two children, daughters both, are dead—one in infancy, the other by her own hand, many years after having been abandoned by Alice. If you thought Alice Neel's paintings were populated with great characters, wait till you get a load of her family.

Alice Neel isn't just a depiction of eccentrics. It's a relatable sociological study, too, about the place of art in American life, and especially in a woman's life. I thought I liked New York painter Alex Katz until his cruel and wrongheaded description of Alice Neel in this film: "She seemed like an angry housewife." In fact, Neel never was a housewife. She had children with several men and raised them in substandard circumstances, some beyond her control and some not. She wasn't a mother first; she was an artist first. Her description of what that meant is as good as any: "When you're an artist, you're searching for freedom. You never find it, 'cause there ain't any freedom, but at least you're searching."