Anita Pallenberg was, model Kate Moss declares, “The original Bohemian rock chick.” And Kate, who dated and married rockers and wannabe-rockers like Johnny Depp, should know.

She was the great rock muse of the ’60s, ex-husband Keith Richards says of the German-Italian Pallenberg. She dated three members of The Rolling Stones, with guitarist-songwriter Keith admitting that their role was chiefly “keeping up with her” as she generated friction and inspired “Gimme Shelter” and “You Can’t Always Get What You Want,” among other songs.

Aptly enough, she even sang backup on “Sympathy for the Devil,” when she wasn’t “making the scene,” popping up in quasi-underground indie films, and co-starring in two of the iconic movies of the era — “Barbarella” and “Performance.”

Filmmakers Alexis Bloom and Svetlana Zill take a shot at capturing the essence of Pallenberg and why she matters in “Catching Fire: The Story of Anita Pallenberg.” They profile a great beauty of her sexist, limited-horizons-for-women era and that first model to take up with famous rockers, immerse herself in their world and become an essential part of it.

If we remember her, it is because of her connection to The Rolling Stones during their most tempestuous, creative and drug-soaked era. But she was more than just a “rock chick,” a striver who used her connection to famous people to become famous herself. Or maybe she wasn’t and she was just kidding herself, despite her 40 or so film credits and the self-consciously poetic turns of phrase in her unpubished memoir, “Black Magic,” generously sampled in “Catching Fire.”

It was to be “a traveler’s tale through a landscape of dreams and shadows,” she wrote.

“My motto was forward, forward forward, never look back” Pallenberg says, her words read and performed in the film by Scarlett Johannson. That line captures the life force and “sparkle” of this singular figure of that storied time. But it also hints at the self-absorption that fed her addictive personality, a life lived without repetenence but also without much in the way of self-reflection.

“Many people confuse me with the roles I played in films,” she disengenously wrote in “Black Magic.” Or not, seeing as how few people saw “Performance” and nobody would mistake her broad, theatrical turn as a “Tyrant” in “Barbarella” for a real woman.

“Catching Fire” makes an intriguing portrait because its first half establishes the Pallenberg in the public perception, and in her mind’s eye — a free spirit with a great eye for fashion. And thanks to her generation-defining good looks, she was someone who could work her way into any “scene” she cast her eye upon. She “washed (painter) Jasper Johns’ brushes,” hung with the Warhol crowd, and caught the eye of blond Stones pretty boy Brian Jones, who could pass for her “twin” when they were photographed together.

And when Jones and Pallenberg got into drugs, and he got into them deeper and became abusive, she turned to the attentive bandmate Keith. Making a movie with Mick Jagger (“Performance”) let her eye wander in that direction for a while. And so on.

The film’s second half spends a lot more time with her children with Richards, son Marlon Richards (whose middle name references LSD) and daughter Angelina Richards, who survived the birth name “Dandelion” that her slightly older brother gave her. And why wouldn’t he name her? Others who knew the couple then assert that little Marlon was raising himself and his sister for much of their rock-gypsies-dodging-drug charges childhood.

Through them and the son of famous photographer Jake Weber, as well as Stones-connected singer Marianne Faithfull, we see the downside of Pallenberg’s mercurial personality — neglected children who raised themselves, giving cocaine to pre-tween Weber, a mid-addiction baby born prematurely who died, an “accidental suicide” by a teen in bed with Anita, and children she lost custody of by giving in to her demons.

Interestingly enough, we see how she lived but never how she supported herself, as her movie career didn’t really manage that. Was it all Keith’s money or family cash? She didn’t write, aged and drugged out of modeling and the acting career was scattered.

It makes for a fascinating, not-quite-complete portrait of a worldly but unschooled woman with talents finding her way into a life that offered her something more than “housewife” in an age when women’s “power” was too often defined by their allure. In that regard, Pallenberg had a leg up on the competition, and she rode that pony as far as any woman of her time ever did.

Rating: unrated, drug abuse subject matter, nudity, profanity

Cast: Anita Pallenberg, Keith Richards, Marianne Faithfull, Marlon Richards, Angela Richards, Jake Weber, Kate Moss, narrated by Scarlett Johansson as Anita Pallenberg

Credits: Directed by Alexis Bloom and Svetlana Zill. A Magnolia release.

Running time: 1:50