Before he was recognized as a culture-changing, once-in-a-lifetime artist, before the comparisons to Picasso and Michael Jordan, before the world tours with Weather Report, before Miles Davis wrote a song about him, and before the ugly spiral into mental illness, self-exile among the homeless and his fatal beating outside a Wilton Manors bar, before all that, Jaco Pastorius was a typical South Florida kid, raised by a single mom in an unremarkable Oakland Park neighborhood, who played football and bought his first set of drums with money from a paper route. The boy genius next door.

Nearly 30 years after his death, Pastorius will have a homecoming of sorts on Friday, Nov. 6, when "Jaco," a captivating new documentary about his mercurial life and music, is shown at Hard Rock Live, where the Fort Lauderdale International Film Festival opens with red-carpet festivities.

More than five years in the making, "Jaco" was produced by Robert Trujillo, bass player for the rock band Metallica and a longtime friend of the Pastorius family. Trujillo says Jaco's energy and attitude is still felt across multiple generations and genres.

"Jaco is a rock 'n' roll hero. Even though he played in Weather Report, I know for a fact that all my friends, like Flea from the [Red Hot] Chili Peppers or Geddy Lee from Rush, we're all influenced by Jaco. He's our top guy," says Trujillo, who will attend FLIFF's opening-night screening.

Completed by director Paul Marchand, the last of three directors to work on the project (sharing credit with Stephen Kijak), "Jaco" weaves never-before-seen film and pictures with new interviews and archival material gathered in longtime friend Bob Bobbing's ambitious audio documentary "Portrait of Jaco" to create a chronological telling of a story that entertains right to its mystifying end.

Thanks to Trujillo, a diverse procession of celebrity musicians offer perspectives on Pastorius' trailblazing journey on his fretless electric bass, including Joni Mitchell, Sting, Flea, Geddy Lee, Juan Alderete (the Mars Volta), Carlos Santana, Bootsy Collins, Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter and Al Di Meola. Each seems to run out of words to describe Jaco's transformative influence.

"Everything changed when he started playing, and it was never the same again," Flea says in the film. "He just changed the rules of what was possible."

But, especially for the local audience, the film gains a soulful authenticity from more humble scenes of life in South Florida in the 1960s and '70s, depicted in family photos and the warm flicker of 8 mm home movies provided by Jaco's brother Gregory Pastorius. Scenes of Pastorius as a 15-year-old performing R&B with the Las Olas Brass on Fort Lauderdale beach and a couple of years later as the only white face onstage at the Downbeat Club near Sistrunk Boulevard stream by as friends relate colorful stories of his struggle on the local music scene.

"The archival footage is just fascinating, and I think people here are really going to enjoy that," says FLIFF president Gregory Von Hausch, who calls the documentary "a great education."

The beginning

John Francis Pastorius III was 8 years old when his swinging big-band vocalist father, Jack, moved the family from a town near Philadelphia to a small bungalow in Oakland Park. In the film, growing up in the Sunshine State is portrayed as essential to Jaco's revolutionary approach to music.

His late father, whose tour absences became permanent with a divorce, is heard in a voiceover describing how his son would go to bed every night listening to music from Cuba on a small transistor radio. Later, his willingness to incorporate all kinds of influences into his music is given a name: Jaco's "Florida sound."

"I grew up in Florida, where there was no real musical prejudice," Jaco tells an interviewer.

The exact moment that Jaco seems destined for greatness is hard to pinpoint, but the genius lurking inside him was encouraged by moments of serendipity and harsh reality.

It is in South Florida where humidity causes his upright bass to break apart and, with no money to replace it, Jaco decides to pry the frets from his Fender electric bass to mimic the rich tone he's after. The fretless bass becomes the gateway to his revolutionary sound.

And it was just after he turned 19 that his wife, Tracy, his Northeast High School sweetheart and later the inspiration for one of his best-known songs, "Portrait of Tracy," delivered their first child, Mary.

"He had a family to feed. He told the family he was going to do something on the electric bass that had never been done before," says his son, John Pastorius IV, of Pompano Beach, in a recent interview.

The genius

Bobby Colomby, of Blood, Sweat and Tears, tells the story of playing for the Bachelors III softball team in Fort Lauderdale in 1974 when he introduced himself to a cute blonde in the outfield, Tracy Pastorius. Asked her marital status, Tracy tells Colomby she is married to "the greatest bass player in the world," a provocative phrase the 23-year-old Jaco frequently used to introduce himself.

When Jaco arrives, Colomby challenges him to prove it, a session he relates onscreen 30 years later with stunned reverence.

"He played 'Donna Lee,'" Colomby says. "That's a Charlie Parker song, with a solo. ... He played it with the facility and phrasing and nuance of a saxophone player. Which I had never heard before on that instrument. I said, 'Look, I'm going to try to get you a record deal.'"

Soon Jaco was in a New York studio surrounded by top jazzmen such as Herbie Hancock and Lenny White, as well as South Florida musicians including Othello Molineaux, Bobby Economou and Peter Graves. The result was the critically lauded 1976 Epic Records album "Jaco Pastorius."

"My goal was to bring Jaco to as many people as humanly possible, to just have them listen and recognize this genius," Colomby tells an interviewer in the film.

Small miracles

Trujillo calls the nearly six-year journey of "Jaco" from inception to the screen a series of small miracles that actually began two decades ago.

Jaco was one of Trujillo's favorite performers when a California surfing buddy working as a bartender at Baja Beach Club in Fort Lauderdale 20 years ago noticed the last name on a credit card handed to him by John Pastorius. The buddy mentioned the chance meeting to Trujillo, who looked John up a few months later when he came through town on a tour with Ozzy Osbourne.

Speaking from his home in Southern California, Trujillo says, "One of the first things I said when I met Johnny was, 'Some day, you've got to make a film about your father. He was the biggest influence and you've got to celebrate that.'"

After years of talking about the project with John and Bob Bobbing, Trujillo made a decision to go all in with his heart and his checkbook.

"I decided I would commit to making this film financially. It needed to be done," he says. "It's easy to believe that this could happen, and that could happen, and that Martin Scorsese is going to show up on your doorstep and say, 'I want to make a film about Jaco.' It's not reality."

Trujillo declines to say how much he has invested, but a Rolling Stone story put the number north of $800,000. The film is being released by Passion Pictures, which also did the Oscar-winning music documentary "Searching for Sugar Man." Trujillo and John Pastorius are the producers, with Bobbing and Lorenzo Esparza the executive producers.

Even with that commitment, the project dragged on for years of editing and re-editing - Trujillo has lost track of how many times he and Marchand thought they had a "finished" film - but for reasons that he ascribes to some greater power. Perhaps Jaco's.

Bass player Jerry Jemmott coincidentally moved from Alabama to a place a couple of miles from Trujillo, heard about the film and offered them a video interview he made shortly before Jaco died, a poignant scene that opens the film with a version of "America the Beautiful."

Rocker Ian Hunter sent Super 8 footage of Jaco recording Hunter's classic "All American Alien Boy."

Then, there was the Clive Davis party, at which Joni Mitchell's date turned out to be a huge Metallica fan and introduced her to an admittedly nervous Trujillo. The meeting turned into a friendship, which allowed Trujillo to get up the courage to ask the iconic songwriter if she would take part in "Jaco."

"It was almost like Jaco was bringing us these treasures," Trujillo says. "Which was a blessing and a curse. A blessing because you want that for your film, of course, but at the same time you've got to re-edit. And sometimes, the re-editing takes forever."

The end

In the film, Joni Mitchell smiles as she relates the story of how she first heard of Jaco, while working on her 1976 album "Hejira." Her explanation for the unorthodox sound she was trying to create mystified the bass player she was working with.

Mitchell recalls: "Finally, he said, 'There's this really weird bass player in Florida. You'd probably like him.' And I said, 'Would he play these things I'm asking you [to play]?' And he said, 'He's already doing that weird stuff.'" Mitchell grins at the camera, and the rich, warm opening notes of "Hejira" begin to pulse.

Trujillo still sounds a bit awestruck in describing the symbolism of Mitchell agreeing to allow the use of her music, which he calls "nearly impossible" to get.

Mitchell was a witness when things began to go wrong for Jaco, describing the injuries he showed her after an altercation with a Los Angeles police officer, the erratic onstage behavior that seemed to become increasingly disrespectful and personal, and her final meeting with him years later, about the time Jaco could be found, as Flea describes it, "playing 'Louie, Louie' on the street for change."

While Trujillo and Marchand acknowledge that the Pastorius family had veto power over the final edit of "Jaco," both say their participation helped the documentary get closer to the truth. The film does not shy away from the darkness that enveloped Jaco, diagnosed as manic-depressive by a doctor at New York's Bellevue Hospital, where he was temporarily committed in 1986.

There are many uncomfortable scenes of Jaco, filled with hubris or alcohol, in a self-destructive mode; recordings of him railing against the music industry and denigrating the talents of other musicians; there are even snapshots of the disheveled musician busking on a New York street corner.

One of the last times John saw his father was when he returned to South Florida in late 1986.

"He was great. He came back sober. He was on his meds. My mother said it was the most proud she'd ever been of him," says John, acknowledging that it didn't last. In September 1987, Jaco rolled up to John's house in Pompano Beach on a bicycle, with a chipped tooth. "He wasn't Daddy, anymore."

Less than a month later, Jaco was at Broward General Hospital after a brutal altercation with a bouncer at a Wilton Manors bar, an event described in an evocative phone conversation between Jaco's father and a friend. He died days later after a brain hemorrhage.

John says his mother, sister and brothers, Julius and Felix, twins born in 1982 to Jaco and second wife Ingrid, were involved with the film. John says he had multiple conversations with Ingrid about taking part, but she "chose to keep her memories of my father to herself." Ingrid died in 2011.

Jaco's tragic lows should not obscure his soaring successes, John says of a career memorialized in 2008 with the naming of Jaco Pastorius Park in Oakland Park, a well-used space distinguished by a large mural of the musician.

"The most interesting story to tell is the truth, the balanced truth," John says. "It's too easy to latch onto the darkness."