ARTHUR RUSSELL Living in his own private Iowa, from Matt Wolf’s Wild Combination.

Anyone who mythologizes the glory days of East Village bohemia will watch “Wild Combination: A Portrait of Arthur Russell” with a frog in their throat. Sympathetic enough to count as a fan’s hagiography, this modestly mounted documentary details the life, death and artistic evolution of Arthur Russell – one of the most remarkable figures to emerge out of the 1970s downtown New York music scene. An Iowa farm boy turned avant-everything cello player, Russell was a child of the corn whose impulsive teenage escape to San Francisco landed him in hippie Buddhist communes and on a recording session with Allen Ginsberg, who features the musician on his 1971 “First Blues” album. Later, Russell would move into Ginsberg’s East 12th Street apartment building and continue writing hundreds of songs, articulating his passions in a keening, emotionally nuanced voice and experimenting with percussive loops and electronic effects that transported his compositions beyond genre.

Russell, whose severe acne and burgeoning homosexuality marked him as an outsider in the Midwest, blossomed in the polymorphously perverse Manhattan of the 1970s. He befriended seemingly everyone, including David Byrne and Philip Glass, with whom he collaborated, and was the musical director of the Kitchen, back when SoHo was an artist’s free zone not an outlet mall. As Matt Wolf’s documentary recounts, through interviews, sound recordings and grainy archival video footage, Russell was not only prodigal but prolific. He embraced the nascent disco movement, creating revolutionary dance tracks, and may well have been the first East Villager to sport a trucker cap because, well, he was from Iowa. Those rural roots are emphasized in poignant conversations with Russell’s now-elderly parents, for whom his homosexuality came as a shock and whose 1992 death from AIDs, at age 40, they accepted with surprising grace – welcoming Russell’s lover, Tom Lee, into their lives. If “Wild Combination” never really manages to give us a complete portrait of Russell, it will whet appetites for his music, which is as at once as unique, and as contemporary, as ever.

Wild Combination is released on DVD Nov. 18 through Plexifilm.