In our celebrity-obsessed culture, the work of creative people is often overwhelmed by the pathos or drama of their personal stories. That’s long seemed the case with the great Mexican painter Frida Kahlo.

Notorious for her iconic, attention-grabbing “look,” her marriage to muralist Diego Rivera, her outspokenness, her communist politics and the tragedy of her personal story — grievous back injuries due to a bus and trolley collision in her teens, a miscarriage and unfaithful husband — her death at 47 seemed to freeze her artistic reputation in the shadow of her personal one.

But the artist and the woman are grandly illuminated in the new documentary, “Frida.” Using her reams of letters and frank, colorfully-illustrated and colorfully-profane personal diaries, filmmaker
Carla Gutierrez (she edited the Ginsberg doc “RBG”) lets us see the woman behind the icon.

And animators Sofia Ines Cazares and Renata Galinda breathe life into the decades of self-portraits, sketches and increasingly surreal doodles that comprised Kahlo’s artistic legacy, showcasing the genius often lost in the bushy eyebrows, traditional Mexicans fashions and the near mustache Kahlo defiantly wore and depicted in her art.

“I paint myself because I’m what I know best,” she wrote, her words read aloud (in Spanish with English subtitles) by actress Fernanda Echevarria del Rivero. She could “express my emotions” as she depicted her current physical and mental state on canvas.

The child of a devout Catholic mother and Mexico city photographer father, young Frida relates how she saw colors and the distinct shapes of her world from an early age.

Green was “good warm light.” Magenta represented “Axtec” images. “Mexican red” is “the color of old blood of the prickly pear” cactus, brown “the color of mole’…earth,” and yellow of “sun and happiness.”

How she saw her world is reinforced with snippets of newsreel footage from the Mexico of her childhood, the early teens of the 20th century, with selectively-colorized shawls, scarves and sombreros.

We hear from school classmates and her first boyfriend that she was “a little strange,” wearing men’s clothes, fond of profanity and blunt in her sexual appetite.

She and that first boyfriend graphically describe the accident that injured her and circumscribed her future life.

“I now inhabit a world of pain” she wrote, still in her teens. But that’s when she took up painting, something her father had dabbled in, more seriously. Laid up, with a contraption of her mother’s design over her bed, she painted herself and her mental state almost from the start.

At 18, recovering, the petite, aspiring artist Kahlo brazenly marched up to revolutionary muralist Diego Rivera, high on a scaffolding at work, and barked “Diego! Get down!” The towering, rotund Rivera — voiced by Jorge Richards — was struck by this fiery little woman with the brass to call him a “womanizer” as she made plain she wasn’t there “to flirt.”

He sized up her art, told her to keep painting, and as she did, a love affair started. They married and Kahlo was swept up into the whirlwind of the most celebrated Mexican artist in the world, traveling to New York and Detroit as he earned fat commissions from rich “idiots” (her words) and she painted, assisted with his murals and absorbed some of his style.

Her look won her attention rich society matrons “who get excited over the dumbest things.” But that fashion sense drew newspaper attention for her art.

She started to come into her own as an artist only after their divorce and her turn towards surrealism.

But in and out of marriage, her affairs are documented — a dalliance with the Soviet expat Trotsky, the French surrealist poet Breton, and others — as are Rivera’s. And the lifelong struggle with pain, so vividly depicted in her art, she relates from her letters and diaries.

One aesthetic blunder in “Frida” is worth noting. The war over movie subtitle colors was fought decades ago, but here the filmmakers avoid yellow subtitles — much more visible against white and all other light colors — for basic white subtitles, which washes out against many backdrops of Kahlo’s life and work. Brush up on your Spanish as the titles are almost lost in many scenes.

But “Frida” is still a beautiful film, both an appreciation of and an eye-opening humanization of its subject. Seeing the art animated with movement can seem redundant, but it is applied to delightful effect here.

The documentary does the best job of any film of rescuing the painter from the iconic, tragic artist who created the work by getting beyond the hair, the fashion sense and the eyebrow-lidded stare that one can’t help of think of when one hears the name Frida Kahlo.

Rating: R, nudity, profanity, smoking

Cast: The voices of Fernanda Echevarria del Rivero, Jorge Richards and others

Credits: Directed by Carla Gutierrez, with animations by Sofia Ines Cazares and Renata Galinda. An MGM film on Amazon Prime.

Running time: 1:27