‘Who am I?’, ‘Maybe you could tell me who I am?’ These are the two questions Logan Lynn asks his audience at the start of his documentary ‘The Pain and the Power: The Life and Crimes of Logan Lynn’. Over the next couple of hours, he takes us on a journey from his early years right up to date to present us with possible answers.

Not one of the big names most of us have heard of, and as he himself says, Logan Lynn is more of a musician’s musician. His first studio album ‘This Is Folk Techno/Pull the Plug’ was released in 1998 when he was 19, and he’s been releasing music consistently ever since, up to and including the soundtrack to this documentary.

Much like Brett Morgen’s David Bowie documentary, ‘Moonage Daydream’, this film plays like a music video with Logan’s story interspersed with old home movies, photographs, animations, clips of him on television and his own music. Even the segments where he sits with his dogs Pretty Baby and Barbara Cheeseburger in a stark, white room talking to the camera come with an underlying track.

While most of us haven’t been anywhere near the music industry, Logan’s is a very relatable tale, especially for those of us queer kids who came of age in the 90s’. If you didn’t actively take part in the hedonistic excesses, you were certainly a witness to them.

Logan grew up in a semi-restrictive religious household. Outwardly Christian, his parents provided some freedom of expression in the toys they gave him. Toys that he was compelled to hide from public view, much like his sexuality. Logan describes himself as a ‘gay kid.  This film goes deep into the extremely dark territories of child abuse, homophobia and addiction, with one especially haunting moment coming as Logan relates his experience working on a reality show with the Weinstein company at the height of his addiction. Needless to say, Weinstein & co. do not come out of this story well.

The film’s darkness is tempered by Logan’s wit and pragmatic delivery, with his two dogs providing the occasional clever comic aside. His music is also upbeat and uplifting and you come to appreciate the influence his childhood heroes had on him. After seeing a very young Logan sing ‘Lost In Your Eyes’ by Debbie Gibson early in the movie, it was lovely to learn that he met her in later life and that he got to meet and work with his other childhood hero, Tiffany.