The regularly snarling, perpetually gold-capped Genesis P-Orridge looks like he would eat you live and floss with your tendons. In the performance piece that has been his 40+ year career of public exhibition, he has mutilated himself onstage, dabbled with imagery suggestive of child pornography and Nazism (though not advocating or facilitating either) and written a holy text based on his dealings in the occult (among things), Thee Psychick Bible: Thee Apocryphal Scriptures ov Genesis Breyer P-Orridge and Thee Third Mind ov Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth. His sonic experimentation is irrepressible (from folk to acid house), but perhaps what he's most revered for is his work as the frontman of Throbbing Gristle, the English avant-garde band initially active in the mid-to-late '70s. TG's collision of instrumental and human noise has rarely felt less than primal (and it led P-Orridge to coin the phrase "industrial music"). It was often shocking, and that was at least part of the point.

Marie Losier's documentary, The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye (currently touring festivals), is then a beautiful counterpoint to a public profile that has often been characterized as frightening. Focusing on Gen's love affair with Jacqueline Breyer (aka Lady Jaye), which began in '93 and thrives today, despite her death in 2007 (more on that in a second), Ballad is a film about the heart behind the Gristle. Emotion is no stranger to Gen's work, but rarely has it been expressed with such gentleness.

"Well, you know how it is, you fall madly in love with somebody hopefully at least once in your life, and there's this moment where you just want to consume each other," explains P-Orridge at the start of the film. "You just say, 'Oh god, I just want to eat you up. I just want to just take you and just swallow you up and just you and me just be one fabulous moment of being in love and not be individuals anymore.'" Ballad documents the point at which this talking becomes living: Gen and Jaye's insatiable need to consume each other became an art project/physical reassignment endeavor they called "pandrogeny." They became each other and shared it with all who were interested in a series of photos and performances. Jaye got a nose job to look more like P-Orridge in the face and they underwent at least one procedure together. "On Valentine's Day 2003, we both got breast implants together and woke up next to each other holding hands," recounts P-Orridge. "It was a very romantic moment."

If this sounds outrageous, it's because P-Orridge is, but he has a way of committing to his weirdness and laughing about it that feels both sincere and humble. (I should note that having only heard the name "Throbbing Gristle" and not their music at the time, I fell head over heels in love with P-Orridge when I heard him say, in 1998's electronic music documentary Modulations, "When in doubt, make no sense. No sense is good. And nonsense is good." Those words are as good as any to live by.) If he weren't so damn smart and dryly humorous, he might not be able to sell his frequent pontificating (which is scattered throughout Ballad), but things like, "Everyone is telling the truth all of the time ... well, it's just that times change," resound because they are simply put and correct. His masterful packaging of his eccentricity makes P-Orridge a prime documentary subject (it's almost amazing it took this long for a feature to be devoted to him), a reality star before reality stars and as yet unsurpassed. He's also tremendously savvy: from even before his time in Throbbing Gristle, when he was in the performance art collective COUM, he obsessively documented himself, predicting our cultural obsession with tangible artifacts of what is and just was by decades.

P-Orridge recounts telling his daughters from a previous relationship about his pandrogenous transition, qualifying it as an "art project…about the same old stuff." That's both a hilarious way of reducing his vision and dead-on: The cut-and-paste aesthetic that Gen and Jaye applied to their bodies was evident in his music for years. Throbbing Gristle loved playing with loops and his work in Psychic TV was sampladelic way before that sensibility was de rigueur in pop music.

All of the philosophical musing is fascinating and uncommonly endearing, but Ballad's mundanity is just as effective, if not more. This is a movie about two people being lovely to each other. After seeing P-Orridge perform in the mid-'00s and then literally bumping into him at an art opening a week later, Losier began to document the musician and his life for years. The fly-on-the-wall footage is breathtaking, like when Gen cooks ravioli for Jaye in their modest New York apartment, or the montage of photos of them kissing, or the heartbreaking, gushing voicemail from Jaye that plays at the film's end. The film manages to be both a linear narrative and free-form:  All of this is interspersed with footage of the already weird-P-Orridge doing weird stuff like pantomiming swimming in an old cap and mugging as he eats chocolates. ("She gets you to wear the most ludicrous costumes and do these bizarre things that at the time you’re doing them you’re thinking, what the hell has this got to do with my life? But when it’s all assembled, it’s like Fellini meets documentary. It’s a very new, radical way of making documentaries," P-Orridge has said of Losier's process.)

However, it is a lack of sentimentality that is what's most remarkable about Ballad. Jaye's death is handled matter-of-factly, portrayed in the vague terms in which P-Orridge clearly views it (as the point of pandrogeny was to become each other, P-Orridge says he carries Jaye with him and, in fact, refers to himself as "we," in the least irritating way in the history of the English language). A Radar story on Gen and Jaye from 2008 was, in fact, more informative and a lot sadder (for example, Jaye's stomach cancer is never mentioned in Ballad).

Make no mistake: This is a tragedy, but it's one of hope and not wallowing. The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye presents possibilities of human expression that go way beyond what can be pressed to disc or compressed to MP3 or splashed on a canvas. Before she died, Jaye told Gen, "I don't care about any of that art s***, I just want to be remembered as one of the great love affairs of all time." The genius of Losier's film is that it encompasses both the art s*** and a truly great love affair, the synthesized work of a career-long synthesizer. Ballad suggests to us that love is not just an art, it is the greatest one.

Rich Juzwiak is a writer and video editor whose work has appeared in the Village Voice, Jezebel, and on This American Life. He runs the pop culture blog Four Four.