At 69 years old – and looking at least 20 years younger – the singer Grace Jones is the subject of this documentary portrait by Sophie Fiennes. It’s a celebration of her musicality and extraterrestrial scariness, and a reminder that films about female singing stars need not be gallant tributes to tragically doomed fragility.

Jones looks like a mix of Liza Minnelli in Cabaret and Arnold Schwarzenegger in The Terminator. She has elaborate headgear that obscures her face, making her look all the more like an icon, or a weapon – and Fiennes’s film hints that this mannerism may be derived from hats favoured in the churches of her Jamaican childhood. (“Bloodlight” and “bami” are Jamaican words for the red studio light and bread.) We see her on tour, yelling at people over the phone for letting her down.

Her career is not at its apex, and, yes, there are moments in which she gets what Spinal Tap’s David St Hubbins might have called an excess of perspective. There’s a great scene when Jones remembers her notorious Russell Harty TV interview – thumping him live, on-air: “I don’t mind Russell. Except for the fact that he died. But I didn’t kill him.”

The film reaches its high point when Jones travels across Jamaica, meeting her relatives and remembering her abusive, violent step-grandfather Master Patrick, or “Mas P”, whose terrifying mannerisms she has imitated or reclaimed: “I’m playing out Mas P. That’s why I’m scary. That’s the male dominant scary person I become.” Her star quality only gets more intense.