Beyond validation, beyond recognition, beyond profit, the measure of an artist is their stick-to-itiveness. When Whitney exhibitions and Absolut Vodka collaborations are bestowed, when everything in life conversely beats you down and tells you to “smarten up,” does the artist persist? In the case of rare breed, bonafide artists like the compulsive and pop-obsessed Kenny Scharf, persisting is all you can do. To not persist would be to give up on one’s own identity.

“There’s no separation between Kenny and his art,” says Kitty Brophy, a fellow artist and friend of the manic 80s lovechild Scharf. This sets the tone for Kenny Scharf: When Worlds Collide, the bubbly and lovingly rendered documentary from Max Basch, and none other than Malia Scharf, the subject’s own daughter. The film helps illuminate a name that may not have gotten its due in the households of its heydays, nor reconstructed itself within the lexicon of millennial artifacting. Scharf’s colourful, chaotic compositions may exist only within a public unconscious, the very place from which the California-born painter, sculptor, and performance artist draws his own imagery. He is best known for his coming to fruition in the 80s East Village pop and street art scenes alongside Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat, and while his cohorts undoubtedly gained larger notorieties during their times (posthumously, as well), Scharf has the privilege of still being alive. He also achieved what his cohorts could not: he started a family. What this documentary celebrates is his consistent vein of passion through it all, as stubborn, insatiable, and scatterbrained as it is.

The structure of When Worlds Collide reveals itself like so many portraits of steadfast artists before it, but that’s because it has to go about depicting an unfamiliar name in a familiar light. Throughout the documentary, we get the inception of aesthetic inspiration during childhood, the salad days of liberation and experimentation during art school, the sobering realities of commercial fame, and what feels like a denouement in family life. But Scharf is still kicking – still exhibiting at the Whitney, still spray painting billboards, and still raving in Cosmic Caverns. At 62, he’s also still perfectly chipper and coherent for interviews. But this becomes both the revelation and the letdown of Basch and Scharf’s film, because where the potential for intense, revelatory introspection on the part of the subject exists, little work is actually done in the way of nudging him there. Maybe this is because his daughter has, out of familial obligation, shied away from anything that could be considered inflammatory, or maybe this angle is utilized in an effort to play it “safe” and give Scharf some mainstream appeal. Whatever the case, it is filmmaking that sometimes dulls the colours of the artist’s vibrant life.

There are some moments of breakthrough, though. When Scharf recalls his last moments with the dying Keith Haring, one of his closest friends, we see him reckoning with a dimension he could never come close to understanding with his art. Another compelling section comes when we see how Scharf started his family in Brazil. After his uproarious halcyon days in New York, the decision almost seems like a 180-degree move for the artist to make. It’s a good thing, too. While the early 80s New York era was easily the most energetic for the artist, it was also the time when he got swallowed up in his own scene and over-shadowed. This early portion of the film sees Scharf become less a subject of the film and more a person of interest in a larger subject that could belong to another film. Fortunately, the documentary makes the wise decision of steering the focus back towards Scharf himself in the film’s final two thirds.

And who is Kenny Scharf? He is kooky, he is tireless, he is intransigent. He is determined to bring the cartoonish, consumable iconography of his childhood back to life in feverish and psychedelic new hellscapes. He is never satisfied with the everyday or the mundane. Instead of making a stop at the bank, he needs to “take his vacuum for a walk;” he needs to glue discarded pill bottles together and hang them from his bathroom ceiling. Basch and Malia Scharf’s documentary captures all of this; you just wish that more of it were relayed to us from or explained by Scharf himself, as opposed to an objective lens. You would think that Malia, the daughter of Scharf, would have a more unfiltered, more intimate access to her subject’s proclivities. Then again, one being too close to their research can always bring into question their biases.

In one scene, Scharf busies himself in his studio while explaining how he sees a face in everything, and he rations that everything therefore has a personality that presents itself to him. For a filmmaker, it is not difficult to find a face and a personality in a documentary subject like Kenny Scharf; what can be difficult is bringing a sincerity and an integrity through in your work. Basch and Malia Scharf should be commended on both accounts. When Worlds Collide is an eager evocation of a half-remembered, half-forgotten nebuloid still puttering out in his own orbit. It is a little delirious and at times misguided in that sense; but then, so is the artist himself.