The disappointed would be those who wanted to know what Smith's quietly intense but beautifully melodic songs meant; those who wanted to know whether the sudden fame that accompanied Smith's Oscar nomination for his song in Good Will Hunting drove him to drugs and eventual death; and those who just wanted to know what Smith was "really like".

"I think there is a desire to really personalise a lot of Elliott's music," Rossi says.

Rossi was a fan on the periphery of the Portland music scene in the mid-1990s when Smith lived and worked there. "For me it was incredibly helpful to go through many a catharsis with Elliott Smith's music because he was so good at coming up with the right words for the right situation in a lot of universal situations.

"But I didn't want to make a movie where we were going to take his music and dissect lyrics [because] people who knew him, who were there when he was making music, really were quick to point out that not a lot of his lyrics were autobiographical. He was a magical storyteller of the human experience."

Instead of speculation then, the film circles Smith and the way, as one of those friends puts it, "just as mysteriously as he appeared, he vanished" – from Texas and Portland, then New York and Los Angeles, but also from people's lives. (Especially after that boggling moment when he appeared on the same stage as Celine Dion, at the Academy Awards, singing Miss Misery in a white suit and perplexed expression.)

Given Smith described himself as "the wrong kind of person to be big and famous" and was never a participant in much of the rigmarole of the industry (there's hardly any footage of Smith, the film dominated instead by radio interviews), what was left was the music and the voices of friends, his sister and fellow musicians.

"There wasn't really an answer and I didn't want to come up with an answer or pretend I'm an authority on the life of Elliott Smith," Rossi says. "The film is there to interact with Elliott as a person, and his music, and figure out what it means for you."

As part of that interaction, Rossi's film has a tempo that is unlike most contemporary music documentaries: measured or maybe more accurately described as slow, as if keeping time with Smith's own music or influenced by another Portland figure, the filmmaker Gus Van Sant.

"For me, the pacing had to be something that was meditative because I didn't want to rush through things and I didn't want to make a film where people would sit there and be anxious with fast paced and splashy graphics," the director explains. "I wanted something to be there for you and let the music of Elliott Smith wash over you with some mildly pleasing visuals. It was the feeling."

Still, Rossi is conscious of the irony of further attention being directed at someone who never felt right in its spotlight.

Although Heaven Adores You has mostly featured in film festivals and now essentially a one night stand of simultaneous screenings across Australia (the night before the ARIA Awards in a delicious bit of incongruous timing), it is part of the industry machine. And the music industry as much as the film industry loves a life-cut-short story.

However, it has to be done Rossi believes, calling his film "a love letter sent off to somebody who had a great influence and impact on a lot of people".

"I think we should all know who Elliott Smith is," he says. "I think when he makes a statement like he is the wrong kind of person to be really big and famous, it does tell you that he had an idea of where this was going to go.

"Fame isn't for everybody and some people are really good at making a living from being famous and some people just aren't."

Heaven Adores You is at the Chauvel Cinema, Paddington, November 25. It also screens on November 25 at the Palace Centro, Brisbane; Palace Kino, Melbourne; Palace Electric, Canberra; and Palace Nova Eastend, Adelaide. And screening at Luna Palace, Perth on November 24.