Russell Brand has become the poster child for transformation.

He exploded onto screens, occasionally naked, in the late 1990’s as televisual catnip. All post-punk hair and eye-liner slithering in Jim Morrison’s borrowed leathers like a Byronesque lothario begging for some attention, any attention.

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He got it, in the UK then the US. But Brand has endured a divisive and polarising rise and fall of favour.

BRAND: A Second Coming, a new documentary on the rollercoaster recalibration of Russell Brand, takes the audience into the mercurial world of the whirling dervish.

After working through six years of footage and two years of following Brand around the globe, director Ondi Timoner extracts an authenticity and raw candour that Brand has not let loose before.

“I think he is incredibly courageous and I have a lot of admiration for his journey and for his courage in letting this film to come out,” Timoner says during her recent trip to Australia for the Sydney Film Festival.

“It was hard for Russell to see this film and allow it to see the light of day as he was very scared that you would stop believing in him after seeing it.”

Notoriously, he failed to show at the film’s premiere at SXSW earlier this year. While supportive of the project, he found it very difficult to watch, telling Timoner, “I went through it already. It was hard enough to live the first time”.

She was not surprised by his no-show: “Every part of his soul is on that screen in that theatre, I don’t know what he could have added to being there.”

Timoner (right) filming Brand for the documentary.

Despite much of Brand’s US notoriety predicated on being the brief husband of Katy Perry, the documentary only features one small, but painfully insightful interview of the two together.

Timoner acquiesced to Brand’s requests to remove another clip with Perry which he felt “was transgressing privacy and not ethically right to share with the public”.

Timoner adds the he is intensely protective of those in (or formerly in) his inner circle.

“We had a public fight about footage of his father and his father was always a hot button. It is out of bounds to analyse that but it really is a sensitive point for him,” she says.

Timoner (pictured here with Brand) found the comedian to be quite different to his on-screen persona.

The project started life as a film on happiness, but after a slew of directors and hundred of hours of footage, Timoner was brought in and reshaped it into a film about Brand himself. With the caveat that she had to have creative control.

The Second Coming sees Brand recasting himself from the super-sexed alpha lad enthralled by fame to a spiritually-conscious advocate for profound social change.

Timoner documents a seismic paradigm shift for the comedian; from trickster to political agitator – it is Brand shedding his skin.

Brand in an episode of his web series The Trews.

Timoner concedes that getting the 40-year-old to take off his various masks was a constant tussle, but one that she is grateful in winning.

“I had to dazzle him and take it to almost another Jedi level to the point where I was making him laugh,” she says.

“It was an extra challenge for me as he is used to manipulating everything and anything around him. There was a constant battle to meet him toe to toe and to challenge him.

“Ironically that was the part that earned me the credit with him. When I would ask him things that he couldn’t believe I was asking. Often, I didn’t know if he was going to throw me out of the car.”

Brand allegedly broke up with ex-wife Katy Perry via text message. Photo: Getty

The tension did lead to some profound moments being omitted (the Katy Perry scene) or access to certain people in his life denied (particularly his father and his ex-girlfriend Gemima Khan) but Timoner said it was a compromise to ensure that he was “at peace” with the film.

“I have learnt in dealing with celebrities or those with a certain station that if you are nice and gracious you never get anywhere,” she explains.

“You have to be willing to throw all your cards on the table. And be thrown out. And then they are cool.”