Let’s hear it for Space.

No, not outer space, although that’s undeniably pretty cool. I’m talking about Portland’s Space, the multimedia venue that’s done its artistic best to make up for the city’s lack of a dedicated single-screen art theater. (Movies on Exchange, how we miss your eccentric, eclectic charms.)

This week sees movie programmer Greg Jamie and the intrepid Space crew bring in not one but two perfect examples of the sort of ambitious, fascinating movie fare a true Maine art mecca thrives on. I was lucky enough (thanks, Greg) to get a sneak preview of both the documentaries “Swamp Dogg Gets His Pool Painted” and “Japanese Avant-Garde Pioneers” playing this week, so let’s get weird.

“Swamp Dogg Gets His Pool Painted” (screening on Friday) is Isaac Gale and Ryan Olson’s documentary portrait of Jerry Williams Jr., better known to the in-the-know music fan as Swamp Dogg. Once a more traditional blues-country singer and songwriter under his birth name, Williams adopted his moniker in 1970 as a way to, as the now 80-year-old cult icon puts it, “just [do] what they considered ‘wild sh*t.’”

And wild is Swamp Dogg’s métier, that’s for sure. Perhaps best known to internet listicle readers as the man behind one of the “worst album covers of all time” (1971’s “Rat On!” features a whooping Swamp Dogg riding a giant smiling white rat), the prolific performer and writer has released dozens of albums in whatever genre and style strikes his fancy (A recent direction is summed up in 2022’s “I Need a Job… So I Can Buy More Auto-Tune”).

Meanwhile, Swamp Dogg is shown in archival footage and a series of sometimes animated vignettes starting his own indie record label (an album of dogs barking Beatles tunes sold quite well), doting on his doctor daughter, and partnering happily with the love of his life, Yvonne, who became his canny business manager before her untimely death.

Swamp Dogg’s modest, tidy Los Angeles home is hung with gold and platinum records — mostly featuring the white artists who covered his countrified songs to great success. It’s in that home we meet two of Swamp Dogg’s lifelong friends and collaborators, the similarly aged and respected virtuoso Guitar Shorty and the younger and more flamboyant musical polymath MoogStar, whose Andre 3000-esque styling meshes perfectly with the older musicians’ constant garage studio improvisations.

Throughout the sprawling, digressive, and completely enrapturing story of Swamp Dogg’s past and present, it’s the unlikely and genuinely touching kinship of these three musical outsiders that gives “Swamp Dogg Gets His Pool Painted” its soul. Each shares their tale of the eccentric, troubled journeys through semi-fame (“The Gong Show,” Jane Fonda’s anti-Vietnam road show, and an HBO comedy special all crop up unexpectedly) to Swamp Dogg’s rent-free communal refuge (where the elderly Swamp Dogg does, indeed, peer thoughtfully over the work of the artist hired to paint… something at the bottom of his cement pool).

Ultimately, “Swamp Dogg Gets His Pool Painted” is a striking, fascinating portrait of a truly singular music genius untroubled with his place on the happy fringe. Equally unlikely celebrity fans (Mike Judge, Johny Knoxville, SpongeBob Squarepants’ Tom Kenney, who’s Swamp Dogg’s neighbor) all drop by to pay respects, and old friend John Prine comes by for one final collaboration before Prine’s death in 2020.

The artist who emerges in the film’s kaleidoscope of anecdotes and visual fancies (MoogStar’s trip to Evel Knievel’s grave is told like a Scooby Doo adventure) is a true original, his ongoing pursuit of an uncompromising but inclusive musical vision marking him out as the legend his small but dedicated fanbase contends he is. The cantankerous old musician’s life contains one last heartbreak, gently incorporated into the film’s final act. As Swamp Dogg, in one of his spoken-word segments peppering the film contends, “Reality is a motherf*cker.”

Which brings us to “Japanese Avant-Garde Pioneers” (screening on Wednesday). More in line with the sort of art-heavy programming Space holds on non-movie nights, this documentary from Amélie Ravalec dives headfirst into the phantasmagorical flowering of illustration, photography, and performance after the devastation of Japan in the Second World War.

A more conventional documentary than “Swamp Dogg,” the film relies on the collective artworks of its illustrious subjects (Nobuyoshi Araki, Eikoh Hosoe, Tadanori Yokoo, and many more) to enliven the proceedings. The tumultuous history of post-war Japan’s student riots and American occupation are presented as the crucible from which a truly striking, disturbing and paradoxically beautiful movement of visual and performance art sprang, the flood of artwork and old clips a dazzling, challenging, sometimes disturbing feast for the senses.

Not so the framework of the film, which is a lot more ordinary. The flood of white Western experts commenting on the artists and their work is also distracting (and telling), leaving me wishing “Japanese Avant-Garde Pioneers” spent more time letting those pioneers (still provocative and active in their old age) speak for themselves. One artist’s recollection of his session depicting Yukio Mishima just days before that Japanese novelist and artist’s shocking failed coup and ritual suicide is worth a movie to itself. Conversely, a study of the recurring theme of culturally specific rope bondage in the artists’ works comes from a white American described as a “rope master,” which just feels wrong.

Quibbles aside, it’s not hard to see the parallels emerge, not just among these still-prolific provocateurs but with the similarly battle-hardened old American musician. One Japanese artist’s assessment that “beauty can be terrifying” echoes across both films in my mind, this applause-worthy double feature testifying to the power of following your inspiration — even to the weirdest places.

IF YOU GO

“Swamp Dogg Gets His Pool Painted” screens at 7 p.m. Friday. “Japanese Avant-Garde Pioneers” screens at 7 p.m.  Wednesday. Tickets for both are $10/$7 for Space members.