The debut doc by editor Carla Gutiérrez explores the great Mexican artist’s life and work through her own words.

My guess is that Frida Kahlo would have loathed “Immersive Frida Kahlo,” the kind of touring exhibit that professes to honor the canvas while bathing it in digital-tech kitsch. And, having seen Carla Gutiérrez’s riveting documentary Frida, I’m certain the artist would have announced her disdain with a laugh and a healthy dose of juicy invective. If you want to immerse yourself in Frida Kahlo, here is the real thing.

Whatever that 2002 movie’s strengths and weakness, Gutiérrez’s nonfiction portrait (which takes its streaming bow March 15 on Prime Video) is, for starters, uncluttered by the layers of performance that define biographical drama. Frida’s voice cast never diverts attention from the heart and soul of the story, and the exquisite work by Fernanda Echevarría del Rivero, as Kahlo, brings the great artist’s joys, sorrows, fierce intelligence and mouthy humor to life with an intense person-to-person intimacy.

Throughout the film, there’s a vibrant interplay between black-and-white footage and the radiance of her palette, with splashes of color occasionally added to the vintage clips like the visual equivalent of Kahlo’s knowing gaze. Víctor Hernández Stumpfhauser’s score, not unlike Kahlo’s singular aesthetic, honors folk roots while branching out into a modern realm of exploration.

As to the biography itself, it begins with photos of a plump toddler with a discerning gaze — hardly a surprise that she would soon be a smartass kid tossed out of class for pestering the priest with questions, or that, as a teen burning with intellectual and sexual hunger, she would hang out with the rebellious boys. Art was not Kahlo’s Plan A; she wanted to be a doctor, but a horrendous 1925 bus accident, when she was 18, would instead turn her into a lifelong patient. “The handrail,” Kahlo recalled, “went through me like a sword through a bull.” The free spirit was trapped, “alone with my soul,” and she began painting.

Emiliano Zapata was a crucial public figure in her childhood, and the film makes clear that through everything she endured — constant physical pain, many surgeries, braces and casts, the endless infidelities of her celebrated husband, Diego Rivera — she never let go of that revolutionary outlook. Art and revolution were resolutely entwined in the frescoes of her beloved Rivera and Mexico’s other great muralists of the early 20th century, David Alfaro Siqueiros and José Clemente Orozco. One of the many delights of Frida is hearing her exuberant cursing (via Echevarría del Rivero) about the titans of industry who commissioned works from Rivera, along with the other “rich bitches,” “jerks” and “gringos” who made her seethe.

Kahlo had her own extramarital adventures, to be sure, among her lovers the on-the-lam Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky and numerous famous artists, both men and women. And yet her struggles to accept Rivera’s affairs, as expressed in her writings, are wrenching; they cut through the simplistic “strong woman” stereotype to reveal the anguish and vulnerability that are often strength’s essence.

Perhaps the most searing example of her piercing insight involves her interactions with the French poet André Breton. Upon a visit to Mexico, he found her paintings in sync with the work of the Surrealists, the school of art he led. She knew nothing about them, and though Breton promoted her work in Paris, he also ignited her fury with his condescending use of cheap Mexican tchotchkes in the exhibit, meant as a thematic complement to her visionary canvases. Eventually, disgusted by the armchair revolutionaries she encountered in the salons of Europe, Kahlo concluded that she hated Surrealism. “A decadent manifestation of bourgeois art,” she called it.

Such razor-sharp perceptions and unapologetic pronouncements fuel Frida no less than the unsettling and beautiful images she conjured. Beyond the artistic pretensions she disdained, Kahlo noted that her canvases depicted her life, not the dreamscapes that were central to Surrealism. It was an exceptional life, and here at last is a film that not only honors her without resorting to sensationalism but that also lets her speak. At the end of Gutiérrez’s fine film, you likely will feel the spell of a remarkable person’s company.