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If you’re a fan of Arthur Russell, the brilliant, idiosyncratic New York musician and composer who succumbed to AIDS at the peak of his powers in 1992, then you probably already know that “Wild Combination” is opening this Friday at the IFC Center.

If you’re not, listen to this:
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Ok, so now you’re a fan.

Russell left behind hundreds of hours of music this good, which the Audika record label has been reissuing for the past few years. The Russell cult has subsequently blossomed and now, thanks to the Brooklyn-based filmmaker and artist Matt Wolf, their hero gets properly canonized with this loving, evocative portrait.

Mixing archival footage with talking head testaments from avant-garde luminaries (Philip Glass) and the Russell inner circle (Tom Lee, his devoted lover, is an especially poignant presence), Wolf deftly tells the basic Russell narrative: From humble roots in Oskaloosa, Iowa to high bohemia in hippie San Francisco, to the avant-garde music, performance, and disco scenes of 1970’s New York.

At once brainy and soulful, melancholy and ethereal, rigorous and playful, experimental and pop, Russell’s music was never intended as a hep cat soundtrack. He wanted to make it big - albeit on his own intransigent terms - bridging downtown cool to universal pop. The height of his fame came in the 80’s with a string of odd disco tunes. Lola Love, vocalist on the delightfully weird “Go Bang,” remembers Russell as “the funkiest white boy I ever met.”

It’s wrenching to think that had he held on a few more years, Russell might have survived thanks to the antiretroviral drug therapy breakthrough in 1996. His life and death belong to the histories of music, downtown culture, and queer hagiography but his music belongs, if anything, to the future.

Some twenty movies are opening in New York this week, not to mention the New York Film Festival, but there’s only two must-sees: “Silent Light,” opening today at MoMA, and “Wild Combination” this Friday at the IFC.

Here’s an exclusive outtake from the movie, courtesy of Matt Wolf.

I was always obsessed with this clip of Arthur’s sneakers (two exact pairs I own myself). I never could find a place for this fairly esoteric and weird material in the film, so I decided to make an “anti-music video.” Here Arthur changes from his “street sneakers” into his “performance sneakers.” This is so emblematic of Arthur’s idiosyncratic and illogical, yet charming and endearing ways. - MW

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