I’ll occasionally be using this spot to expound upon off-the-beaten path indies, foreign films and forgotten classics worth your time on DVD, and this week I’d like to throw a spotlight on the most improbably illuminating big screen documentary biography of recent time.

Forget about her chirpy, campy reinvention on The Surreal Life several years ago; it was Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato’s The Eyes of Tammy Faye, short-armed by distributor Lions Gate in the summer of 2000, that landed the erstwhile co-founder of The 700 Club that VH-1 gig, and still stands as the definitive rendering of the complicated life of the ex-Tammy Faye Bakker.

Lest you require a brief refreshing, Tammy Faye was a frighteningly mascaraed demigod of the Reagan-era “electric church,” an awesomely complicated empire of goodwill, religious celebration and avarice that, perhaps more than most realize, eventually helped plunge this nation into a more cynical ’90s. Perkier than Kelly Ripa on espresso and given to empathetic tears at the holler of, “And we’re back!,” she oversaw, with her husband Jim, an unrivaled, mainstream marketing of religion that is a direct antecedent of today’s various influential Christian “voting blocs.”

Narrated with an arched brow by RuPaul Charles, The Eyes of Tammy Faye gets to the contrarian heart of its subject in a way that even Bailey and Barbato’s Inside Deep Throat didn’t. Equally revelatory and entertaining, the film overcomes Tammy Faye’s uncomfortably screwy public persona — she still flies the freak banner high here, but a little less gloriously — by offering what will be for many viewers their first unprocessed glimpse of Tammy Faye’s unfettered spirituality, which while so hard to accept at face value in reductive media snippets here informs her character and comes off as altogether genuine. Tammy Faye is thus resurrected, unlikely though it may seem, as a sensitive, sympathetic and generally good-hearted martyr who found herself in over her head, and paid with the sort of complete humiliation that only a 24-hour cable news cycle world can dispense.

The film opens by detailing its subject’s childhood and her April Fool’s Day marriage (a telling date, some would say) to an earnest young itinerant preacher named Jim Bakker. After watching their successful local children’s TV show fold, the two went on to launch The 700 Club, the first Christian talk show of its kind. A dream of Jim’s, it was an afterthought as part of a deal with Jerry Falwell for the pair to create and oversee another children’s show based around their puppet characters — a sort of Mr. and Mrs. Bakker’s Neighborhood, if you will. Both were successful, but it was the former that became a phenomenal worldwide hit over satellite and cable outlets before Jim and Tammy Faye were ousted acrimoniously.

The couple then started Praise the Lord, another Christian cable TV venture. The response was huge; Jim and Tammy Faye were bonafide small screen stars, and their dreams of a non-denominational Christian empire culminated in the construction of Heritage USA, a sprawling, immaculately designed resort and water theme park. Soon though, PTL turned into a never-ending telethon, with Bakker claiming that he needed to raise three or four million dollars a week just to stay afloat. Uncertain with the direction of it all and stricken with panic attacks, Tammy Faye developed an addiction to painkillers. Proving tragedy and comedy often come in threes, the PTL dream then came crashing down in a hail of embezzled donations, bitter feuding, familial back-biting and, of course, Bakker’s notorious sex scandal with Jessica Hahn, amusingly rendered here with an interview and, umm, artistic footage from her Playboy home video.

Though the filmmakers have an obvious affection for their subject, The Eyes of Tammy Faye is relatively even-handed in its presentation of opinion, if not necessarily the most deep-digging piece of entertainment journalism. Bailey and Barbato stock their film with production bells and whistles both playful (sock puppet bumpers introduce scenes with thematic cards like “A Star Is Born” and “Love at First Sight”) and grandiose (Falwell’s kiss-off press conference in which he claimed the Bakkers were attempting to extort money from PTL plays complete with slow motion and shrieking music of betrayal). There’s also a terrific sense of humor and chiding juxtaposition throughout. In one scene, Tammy Faye explains that she’s kicked prescription pain killers and all other addictions — except for Diet Coke, which can’t be that bad since it’s a habit she shares with President Clinton, who is then seen tersely sipping a frosty one during his Monica Lewinsky deposition.

It may seem strange to call a film like The Eyes of Tammy Faye explosive, but that’s just what it is — a fascinating, cathartic, from-the-ground-up reconstruction of an American pariah, and a full-bodied, three-dimensional look at one of the more outrageous personalities of the opening salvos of a culture war that’s still raging in this country.