Not far into “Ornette: Made in America,” Shirley Clarke’s kaleidoscopic film portrait of the saxophonist and composer Ornette Coleman, is a scene in which Mr. Coleman sits on the porch of his childhood home in Fort Worth. He’s talking with his son, Denardo, about the imperative of original artistic expression and how it survives both the barbs of ungenerous critics and the bile of envious peers.

As he speaks, a clangor arises in the background. It’s the sound of a railroad crossing bell as a freight train goes by, just beyond the ramshackle frame of the house. Mr. Coleman, still holding forth in his soft, lisping voice, doesn’t appear to notice the racket until Denardo points it out.

“Oh, yeah,” he says, smiling distractedly. “That train used to wake me up every morning. Yeah, I was living really close to the track there.”

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It’s a fleeting moment that the documentary holds up as a glowing ember of insight. The din of that mechanical bell: doesn’t it call to mind the urgent commotion in so much of Mr. Coleman’s music? Of course it does, especially in light of an abrupt cut to Prime Time, his crypto-funk band, in feverish midgroove. You’re invited to draw this connection yourself, fancying a peek into the artist’s psyche, though Mr. Coleman remains as much an enigma, and his music as radiantly confounding, as before.

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“Ornette: Made in America,” which was released theatrically in 1985 and opens again, in a print restored by Milestone Films, at the IFC Center in Manhattan on Friday, is full of such tantalizing stuff: formal juxtapositions, half-sketched implications, parallel experiments of image and sound. By virtue of the footage alone, it’s a valuable time capsule for anyone drawn to Mr. Coleman’s work, particularly in the two decades following the cusp of the 1960s, when his dauntless, affirming vision of free improvisation famously created a crisis of faith in jazz.