Sam Hunt CNZM, QSM left the theatre when the Q and A started after the Auckland Festival screening, but then he came back in and people called out for him to go up the front, so he did. We waited eagerly for his take on the warts-and-all film his friend Tim Rose had made about him Did he like it? Was it true? Instead, of course, he burst into verse – not his own, but an Elizabethan poem, with hawks, that he thought might have been written by Christopher Marlowe – telling us the poem, he said, because that’s what popped into his head as he watched.

I don’t know if anyone believed he hadn’t prepared this, I certainly didn’t, but whether that was ‘true’ or not was immaterial, because as he said the words he drew us into a sense of how life’s mysteries can be glimpsed and almost grasped through poetry. It was classic Sam Hunt magic, beautifully staged, perfectly timed, enigmatic and yet very real. It brought the house down.

Rose and Scott’s editing of the mass of archival and newly shot footage (acquired over four years) in this intimate biopic is masterly, the music from Hunt’s CD collaboration with David Kilgour, Falling Debris, a perfect fit. There’s a lot of talk about the Hunt persona that free ranges over his life, thought and work. “It’s all mythology, the whole thing’s mythology”, says one. “With Sam you never know which comes first, the reality or the attitude to that reality”, says another. And then a third, “He is what he says he is.”

The ‘truth/mythology’ conundrum is both discussed and demonstrated. In one scene Hunt chats with Tim Rose’s daughter Isabella and her friend Isabella. Hungry for answers, these two fresh-faced high school kids run some ideas by him. Why do they have to analyse poetry at school as if it has only one meaning? And, a more pragmatic question, how has he made a living over the years? Hunt launches into an elaborate story of the time when, in a pool game, he won the boarding house in Mangaweka that was later immortalised in his friend Robin White’s painting. Seeing the teenagers spellbound, Hunt spins out the tale. The film cuts to publisher Alister Taylor describing buying the boarding house for Hunt. Back to Hunt, conceding that Taylor’s version may be true – or not. What does it matter? Everything’s a story, isn’t it?

At the screening it was weird seeing Sam Hunt seeing Dick Frizzell and C K Stead and Brian Edwards and Colin Hogg et al sitting in the audience, watching themselves talk about/critique/celebrate him, his work, his antics. (We were at the back – we could see them all). What was Stead thinking when Hunt says, “Academics are fuckwits who never check their facts”? What was Hunt thinking during Stead’s carefully measured view of his work that, while he’s “a natural lyricist” he has “a narrow range”? Was this one of the bits that Tim Rose said at the Q and A were hurtful to the poet?

Whatever the individual take, and many of those interviewed are long time friends, there’s general agreement (although not from his two odd-seeming brothers, who think he’s odd), that Hunt – wit (“I was a bit pissed at the time”, he says of his birth), troubadour, raconteur, attention-seeker, man-of-the-people, rock’n’roll minstrel, Kiwi icon, iconoclast, outlaw – is a seriously important poet, a man good enough to be chosen, on a recommendation from Bob Dylan, to open for Leonard Cohen here in 2009, a man whose work “expresses the nation’s heart” and who thoroughly deserves to be the author of his own mythology.

The warts. We hear a lot about the booze and the weed – Hunt is rueful about the time he couldn’t perform at a much-anticipated gig because he was so wasted – and in quite a few scenes Hunt, wine glass always at hand, is more than a little the worse for wear. He tried being sober for a few years, didn’t like it. We hear from Gary McCormack that Hunt can be “a bit of a prick”. We can see for ourselves that Hunt isn’t always at peace.

Drunk, stoned or sober, Hunt’s contributions to this riveting film are the highlights. Whether he’s talking about poetry (“As a poet you’re naming things … poems come from the primal scream”), his influences (James K Baxter, “the sound of my heart beating”), his sense of total isolation (inhabiting “that no-man’s land between the stage and the page”) or his family, you hang on every word.

Long ago I was teaching in a boys’ school and Sam Hunt was booked to come and talk about poetry at a school assembly. I knew the kids would give him a hard time and I was really nervous, embarrassed in advance about the abominations they’d unleash. I was right – when Hunt came on stage in his signature stove-pipe jeans, flowing shirt and scarf, hair flying every which way, there was a rumble of barely suppressed derision from hundreds of adolescent male throats. Then Hunt began to speak and, until he’d finished what he’d come to say, he held them all, transfixed, in the palm of his hand. This film does that too.

Sam Hunt trailer