Can’t hold them back

The irascible Flavor Flav might appear on television with more frequency than his stentorian partner Chuck D, but judging from Wednesday’s world premiere of “Public Enemy: Welcome to the Terrordome,” at AFI Fest, Chuck D is still the star of the P.E. movement.

The documentary shows Public Enemy’s beginnings as a mobile DJ unit and college radio show from Long Island, New York, and while it touches on the group’s rise to international fame with their sophomore release “It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back” in 1987, it also attempts to establish why the group remains relevant.

It’s a topic close to Chuck D’s heart. “We’re the Rolling Stones or the Bob Dylan of the rap game, most people know it, but Americans know it last,” he said before the screening, walking the red carpet on the rooftop of the Arclight Cinemas in Hollywood.

“What makes us great is that we’re creators, innovators, and we’ve always been leaders,” added Flav, clad in a brilliant pomegranate suit and spectator wingtips, a salad-plate-size clock swinging from his neck. “I want Public Enemy to be remembered as one of the greatest rap groups of all time.”

In the mid-1980s, Public Enemy introduced the world to a kind of lyrically and musically complex hip-hop that critiqued racism and social injustice using the language of black revolutionaries from the 1960s, such as Malcolm X and H. Rap Brown. “They more or less single-handedly created what we now think of as conscious hip-hop,” said Bill Adler, the group’s publicist for their first two albums. “There was a punk element to their music. It was deliberately noisy, clamorous and sample-based, but the samples were atoms and molecules of extremely potent classic funk, for the most part, and rock ‘n’ roll.”

The documentary, which is timed to commemorate the 20th anniversary of “It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back” and Public Enemy’s landmark 1987 London tour, grew out of director Robert Patton-Spruill’s years-long relationship with Chuck D. The pair were introduced in 1998 at a meeting at Miramax, and they began to collaborate on music videos and footage for a tour DVD in 2000.

Since then, Patton-Spruill has been amassing material for the documentary -- concert footage, candid moments of band members bantering (or arguing) and interviews with musicians including the Beastie Boys, Henry Rollins and Tom Morello about the group’s impact on them.

“The film really developed organically, not something that we planned,” Patton-Spruill said.

While the film does show the group performing their most iconic songs, it also features footage of Public Enemy playing with a full band and even moshing on stage before predominantly white crowds at venues like Austin’s South by Southwest festival. The idea, Patton-Spruill said, was to convey the range and scope of their music.”They’re a punk band when it really comes down to it; that’s where their heart and soul really is,” he said.

Even though “Welcome to the Terrordome” is screening Saturday at AFI Fest, Patton-Spruill said he has every intention of continuing to tell the band’s story. “Great art is never finished, it’s just abandoned,” said Patton-Spruill. “So hopefully, one day we’ll do the 40-year doc on Public Enemy.”