JJ Kramer started making a documentary about Creem — the music magazine his father started in Detroit more than 50 years ago — as “a very humble passion project that we didn’t know if anyone would really see.”

That ambition now seems charmingly modest as “CREEM: America’s Only Rock ‘n’ Roll Magazine” prepares to open wide this week.

The documentary, directed by Scott Crawford, began life as a 2016 Kickstarter campaign that wound up overfunding and also bringing an army of artists — including Alice Cooper, Ted Nugent, the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Chad Smith, Joan Jett, Kiss’ Paul Stanley and Gene Simmons, R.E.M.’s Michael Stipe and many more — into the fold as fans and supporters. The film, which features a score by the MC5’s Wayne Kramer, premiered at the 2019 South By Southwest Film Festival in Austin, Texas, and made several other festival appearances before Greenwhich Entertainment acquired it in February.

“CREEM” now rolls out on Friday, Aug. 7, in select theaters and Virtual Cinema.

“It’s surreal,” says Kramer, an intellectual property attorney in Columbus, Ohio, who became Creem’s owner when he was four years old, after the death of his father Barry Kramer in 1981. His mother, Connie, took the reins at the time and sold Creem in 1986. “The further and further we got in this process the more real it started to become. It evolved into this real, legit movie production that’s really engaged a lot of people.”

There’s good reason for the interest.

Creem, which published from March 1969 through 1989, launched in Detroit’s Cass Corridor with a mission to, true to its name, capture the energy and spirit of rock ‘n’ roll with a different tone from more straightforward publications such as Rolling Stone and Crawdaddy. Creem’s crew, led by early editor Dave Marsh, certainly took the music and its importance seriously, but invested Creem with an irreverent, street-level personality that embraced the culture as well as the craft.

Creem featured work by notable writers such as Marsh, Lester Bangs, Cameron Crowe, Robert Christgau, Robert Duncan, Billy Altman, Ben Edmonds, Jaan Uhelszki (who co-wrote the movie’s script) and many more, as well as musings by musicians like Patti Smith and the MC5’s Rob Tyner. The articles — such as Creem’s Profiles, which parodied the staid Dewar’s Profiles — were filled with as much essaylike perspective as journalism, while photo captions were meant to be funny and, at times, unapologetically offensive.

Cartoonist Robert Crumb, meanwhile, drew characters such as Mr. Dreamwhip and Boy Howdy, which achieved iconic status.

“It was a rock magazine with a capital R,” Suzi Quatro says during the film, while fellow Michigan native Jeff Daniels adds that, “Buying Creem was a little bit like buying Playboy. You didn’t want your parents to see either one of them.”

Creem’s reputation and legend were well established by the time Barry Kramer moved the operation to a communal headquarters in Walled Lake and then offices in downtown Birmingham — where a young Chad Smith rode his bicycle, only to be bowled over by seeing Alice Cooper exiting the building. The “CREEM” movie tracks that history — “Warts and all,” says JJ Kramer — chronicling the inner-office politics and staff eccentricities with loving detail and insider knowledge, providing a rich portrait from those who knew it best, along with archival footage, photos and animations to dramatize specific events.

“You could make a dozen films about Creem and still not tell the full story,” says director Crawford, who documented the Washington, D.C., punk rock scene of the ’80s in 2014’s “Salad Days.” “I wanted to focus on the heyday of the magazine and the cast of characters that made Creem what it was. Obviously the magazine took on a life of its own, but it’s a (film) about people, really.”

“CREEM” is even more than that for JJ Kramer, of course.

“It’s really been a lifetime in the making,” he says, recalling times when Crawford asked him not to attend some of the interviews, including those with his mother, who resides in Commerce Township. “For me it was this incredible opportunity to tell a really cool story and in the process to learn about my dad, who throughout my life I’ve only heard about anecdotally, through various stories,” Kramer says. “This is as close as I can come to having a cup of coffee with him.

“So for me there were a lot of emotional moments. But it was everything I guess I hoped it would be, coming out the other end feeling like I know way more about him — and way more about me.”

With “CREEM’s” wide release and the trademark’s ownership now firmly in his hands, Kramer says “what happens next is as important, if not more important.” A home video is planned with additional features, and Crawford voices a desire to possibly explore other, later eras of Creem’s history. This fall, meanwhile, Kramer plans to publish a commemorative, limited-print edition of the magazine that will highlight its history.

He’s also developing a Creem television show, with a number of possible directions — “anything from a Top 10 format to something that’s animated to a proper, scripted show based on the characters we see in the documentary,” Kramer says. He’ll also be ramping up Creem merchandising because, he notes, “Everybody needs a Boy Howdy T-shirt — or a Boy Howdy mask!”

“We’re looking at the documentary as sort of the beginning of what Creem can be going forward,” says Kramer, who’d also like “to have Creem start producing new editorial content. If you look at what’s going on out there socio-politically right now, there’s a lot of similarities and parallels to what was going on in 1969 that sort of lit the fuse on Creem 1.0.

“I think there’s a great opportunity for a Creem 2.0 to be born out of everything that’s going on right now. It will most certainly be different. Creem needs to evolve just like anything else. But the spirit will the the same, that  rock ’n’ roll, DIY spirit. That’s the hope, anyway.”

“CREEM: America’s Only Rock ’n’ Roll Magazine” premieres Friday, Aug. 7, in select theaters and Virtual Cinema. Locations and outlets at creemmovie.com. “CREEM” moves to TV on demand services on Aug. 28.