‘Died Young, Stayed Pretty’ chronicles cultural dialogue in four colors

The artists who design and hand-print original concert posters are like no ad men you’ve ever heard of. It doesn’t much matter to them if you buy what they’re selling, or even whether or not you can easily tell what the product is. They just want your eyeballs glued to their work, the best specimens of which still agitate long after the nights of music they promote have passed. Your revulsion is as welcome as your admiration, maybe more so.

Director Eileen Yaghoobian’s frenetic documentary film “Died Young, Stayed Pretty” — which makes its local premiere at the Corcoran Gallery of Art on Thursday evening — presents these creators as an irascible but lovable bunch of cranks, holding forth for her Panasonic Mini DV camera on the grotesqueries of American society. You’re glad they channeled their energies into art rather than blogging — though their chosen form’s small reach seems to feed their cherished identities as outsiders.

The ideology of their work isn’t uniform, or even necessarily coherent. But what’s immediately clear is they’re inspired by much more than just the music of the punk and indie bands whose names appear on their posters almost as an afterthought.

The film’s arrival is the culmination of a five-year journey for Yaghoobian, one that began when a colleague showed her the Web site gigposters.com, where artists display, discuss and sell their wares.

“I instantly connected to the imagery being used to represent these bands,” Yaghoobian says by phone from a St. Louis hotel room, midway through her 20-city junket. “There’s a cultural dialogue” in the imagery. “What’s happening in the posters reflects the culture now.”

Appropriately, her movie unspools as a 94-minute free-form conversation with poster artists in more than a dozen cities around the U.S. and Canada. She deliberately eschewed a narrator or even any kind of narrative, preferring that the film’s tempo and structure emulate the scattershot energy of a gig poster.

Though she’s done short-subject film and animation, and worked on the crew of indie films, “Died Young” is Yaghoobian’s first feature. She shot it herself, on her own dime, during the course of three years beginning in the spring of 2004. Yaghoobian contacted artists whose work she admired on Gigposters. If they were willing to put her up, she’d travel to interview them, usually spending a few days but sometimes staying for as long as three weeks.

That the filmmaker was a guest in her subjects’ homes was a move born of financial necessity, but one that seems to have given her an intimacy with them that works in the movie’s favor. Hearing Austin, Texas, artist Rob Jones unpack the psychological speculation behind his poster of Elvis Presley, you get a sense of the hours Yaghoobian spent hanging out with these guys.

After hopscotching among music hubs like Austin, Nashville, Tenn., Minneapolis, Chicago and Montreal, Yaghoobian finally landed in Vancouver. She got a grant from the Canadian government to keep the lights on for the year of 20-hour days it took her to whittle the 250 hours of footage she’d shot into something releasable.

“I could have made five films out of what I had,” Yaghoobian laughs. “I could have made the history of rock posters. I could have done the rivalry among poster artists. But I didn’t want to do that. I wanted to mimic the energy of rock posters, and leave it to the audience to interpret all these different voices for themselves.”