In 1958, Robert Frank published The Americans, a book of 83 images he culled from 9 months on the road across the nation, during which time he shot 27,000 pictures.

He is one of the most influential photographers in the history of the medium, and one of the people who has formed the mental picture of what 20th-century America looked like.

Now he's got the camera on him in the documentary Don't Blink—Robert Frank, playing tomorrow night through Sunday at Northwest Film Forum, and he's stubborn about it, reticent to say much, and cranky, and it's dreamily engrossing.

Frank is a funny interview because he doesn't believe in language. But he shows reels of his films to his director, Laura Israel, who has been his film editor for 20 years, and throws his shadows over them, narrating quirkily. His movies themselves, which are far less known than his photographs, are wacky and wild, very much of the period in the middle of the 20th century that brought about figures (who are sometimes included in the movies) like Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsburg, William Burroughs, and the whole early hippie crowd around Whole Earth Catalog founder Stewart Brand.

We see the 91-year-old, wispy-haired photographer in New York, in the studio. What a clutter. We see him in Mabou, Nova Scotia. Freezing, isolated. His wife, June Leaf, is vivid. His children are vivid, too, then too sadly for words, they are gone.

If you want a straightforward documentary, Don't Blink—Robert Frank is out. But who wants that, anyway?