Ordinarily, you’d never make a documentary that undermined its own voice as a storytelling tool.

So often with biographical documentaries, the push seems to be toward being authoritative, to tell the story. Maybe the untold story, maybe a truer, more intimate version. Thus, we can almost hear the pitch to Kathleen Hanna for The Punk Singer. Director Sini Anderson wants to articulate the Kathleen Hanna story like it’s never been told before. It’d be the unadulterated life of the punk icon without the tabloid fodder, the name-calling or the Rolling Stone spin that’s converged for 20 years on the lightening-rod feminist artist, overcharging private biographical details and distracting from Hanna’s artistic and social missions.

What makes The Punk Singer so vastly different is that the truth of Kathleen Hanna’s story is that Middle America, patriarchy and rock journalism may not let her own it. Even 25 years after she took the Pacific Northwest by storm. Even as far as her own psyche is concerned.

When 2013 Hanna has completed a series of talking head interviews in The Punk Singer — from her private backyard docks and high-ceilinged white-walled living room to which she’s been retired since 2005 (in stark contrast to the scenery of a fierce DIY artist born of a lo fi, VHS aesthetic) — she seems to stop and imagine the reception of this documentary. In the preceding 80 minutes, she has bared her soul in a quieter, more confessional way than her music ever allowed. And it still may not be enough.

“When a man tells a truth, it is accepted as truth,” Hanna explains in the film’s waning moments. “There’s no questioning or doubting that truth. When a woman tells a truth, there’s a suspicion, a suspicion that she is exaggerating.”

So if you’re the sort of observer who measures the gap between Hanna’s best-known bands, the riotous Bikini Kill and the more commercially successful dance punk of Le Tigre as a selling out or her growing comfortable, attempt to consider it, instead, as a metaphor for what her feminism currently faces.

The Punk Singer shows Hanna and Beastie Boys husband Adam Horovitz as massively troubled by the Woodstock 99 rapes, and the American blindness they disrupt by talking about them. If Woodstock 99 happened today, we’d hope the outrage to be nearly ubiquitous. Yet, we still live in a world where Kathleen Hanna doesn’t anticipate her truth will be accepted as truth. That it will be measured against something else, and someone will accuse it of false anger or unnecessary radicalism.

So. Can you make the authoritative documentary about someone who cultural authority refuses to recognize?

That self-narrative hopelessness is what shapes the frontwoman. From her most dynamic and captivating stage performances — she compares her own singing voice to a bullet finding its mark — to candid confessions that her current battle with late-stage Lyme disease had nearly crushed her personally and professionally, this documentary is the multimedia version of the feminist zines Hanna was brandishing from her principal position in the mid-1990s riot grrrl movement.

We begin with old photos and living room footage that tell us of Hanna’s abusive father, her years as a revolutionary collegiate visual artist, and writer Kathy Acker advising her to start a band because her spoken-word poetry would never reach a broader audience. We roll through the early days of Bikini Kill in Olympia, Wash., with the idea of a band as a social voice initially superseding its musicality.

By contrast, the documentary very succinctly addresses the common talking points of Hanna’s career, which it doesn’t want to belabor but must acknowledge. Yes, she worked as a stripper, today’s Hanna addresses in two sentences. She wishes there would have been other means of support for herself. Yes, when she performed in a tank top and underwear, she was prominently using her sexuality as part of Bikini Kill’s ethos. Those were the cards on the table. They were not, however, the table.

Former bandmate Tammy Rae Carland described the dire straits of punk and hardcore music by and for women in the late ‘80s, emphasizing the absolute need for Hanna and a band such as Bikini Kill which simultaneously battled and digested cultural stigma of girls and women.

“It had to happen, or else we would have all starved to death, culturally.”

When it came to the immersive irony of what Hanna was undertaking in Bikini Kill, she ruled with a frantic, physical violence of tone and volume that protested the gender subjugation of women. Simultaneously, though, a girlish scream came forth in which she sardonically spoke to the male establishment (“an elusive asshole male” she describes him): a kind of subversion of what it looks like to surrender.

Because of the scrutiny Hanna has faced her entire career, The Punk Singer is tempered in the way it pulls back the curtain on the revolutionary. Because the stunt has been attempted with such violation so many times. Two decades of invasive questions about Hanna once stripping to make ends meet or demanding details about her childhood mandate that Anderson’s camera be quiet and respectful compared to the anger and difficulty it hopes to capture.

In 2014 where “indie” and “DIY” in art are increasingly bandied about to mean anything that’s not Columbia or Paramount or HarperCollins, watching Hanna literally usher women to the front of her shows as both empowering symbolism and as literal protection from men who the documentary portrays as overly violent moshers still resonates as the statement a 20-year-old Hanna must have hoped it would. More astoundingly grassroots still, is gathering women in Washington D.C. for riot grrrl to write manifestos and help spell out what a Third Wave Feminism movement might be.

Back to the term. Maybe the punk bands of men who didn’t feel like they had to combat the sexism of people at their own shows or the near-rapes of the college roommates were still DIY. If they were recording an album in their basement, maybe they were still doing it themselves. But “The Punk Singer’ did more herself.

Chance Solem-Pfeifer is Hear Nebraska’s staff writer. It’s touched on briefly in the doc, but this back and forth between Hanna and Gloria Steinem is a piece of 20th century counterculture gold. Reach Chance at chancesp@hearnebraska.org.