The traditional rock legends who died younger are sadly quite a few: Hendrix, Joplin, Cobain. Syd Barrett, a founding father of Pink Floyd, lived to be 60 — hardly a ripe outdated age. However his inventive dying, a protracted one, occurred in his 20s, and he had turn out to be a recluse earlier than he turned 30.

The documentary “Have You Received It But? (The Story of Syd Barrett and Pink Floyd)” is lengthy within the making — its co-director, Storm Thorgerson, an acclaimed album designer and a good friend of Barrett’s, died in 2013 — however it’s as complete and coherent an account of Barrett’s counterculture tragedy as one may hope for. And whereas the movie, co-directed by Roddy Bogawa, illuminates Barrett to a higher diploma than another account I’ve come throughout, it maintains the artist’s enigma.

Not out of romanticizing him; as enigmas go, Barrett was the actual deal. In his temporary public tenure because the face of Pink Floyd, Barrett didn’t overtly put out a messianic line like different rock stars of the period. However he was innately magnetic. David Gilmour, who took the guitar duties in Pink Floyd after Barrett may not operate, was, like the opposite band members, a good friend of Barrett’s from the early ’60s. He calls the person “fiercely clever” and says that, earlier than Barrett was ravaged by drug abuse and psychological sickness, “life was simply too straightforward for him, in a means.”

He wrote songs about underwear snatchers, gnomes and the photo voltaic system. (Put up-Barrett, Floyd turned extra grandiose, socially acutely aware and commercially big.) His psychedelia had a pressure of Edwardian whimsy, till it didn’t; one in all his final Floyd songs was known as “Scream Thy Final Scream” and it wasn’t kidding. The movie intersperses frank speaking head interviews — Thorgerson, whose firm helped craft Floyd’s album covers, is, in any case, chatting with his pals and collaborators right here — with surreal allegoric scenes each trippy and dire. Barrett’s slide into acid casualty is heartbreaking, but the person was so singular that one has to name this cautionary story distinctive.

Have You Received It But? The Story of Syd Barrett and Pink Floyd
Not Rated. Operating time: 1 hour 34 minutes. In theaters.