As the film’s director, Dresden-born Leopold Grün put it: "Reed’s life was a mosaic dominated by his longing for success and his naive political engagement at a time when the world was divided by two major ideologies."

By the time he was 23, the 1938-born Reed had dreams of becoming an Elvis Presley-style singer in the United States, and even recorded ballads and country-style protest songs on the Capitol label, albeit with little success. Yet when he discovered his records were selling well in Latin America he began touring extensively in Chile, Argentina, Bolivia and Brazil. By the late 1960s he was mobbed wherever he went, as Grün’s movie colourfully illustrates.

Reed, the pacifist, ripened into a Marxist in the revolutionary climate of South America. He campaigned for Salvador Allende, and was pictured congratulating him at his inauguration ceremony as Chilean president in Santiago in 1973.

By 1974, Reed was performing in the Soviet Union and across eastern Europe. Interviewed in the film, Egon Krenz, who briefly succeeded Erich Honecker as East German head of state in late 1989, says that after Reed’s arrival in East Berlin in the early 1970s, he was told what would be expected of him. Soon Reed was busy visiting schools, factories and clubs, singing his protest songs and spreading the gospel of Marxism to young and old alike. In return, he enjoyed a privileged life, living in a lakeside bungalow in Schmöckwitz on the eastern outskirts of Berlin, for which he paid only a nominal rent.

"For young East Germans Dean Reed was, with his charm and handsome looks, an American hero for us in cut-off East Berlin," said a middle-aged woman after seeing the film. "It didn’t matter that his voice was not that special. He’d chosen to live among us. We liked that."

But attitudes towards the singer eventually changed. People gradually tired of his voice, and his unquestioning loyalty to the Soviet Union. On a visit to the US in the mid-1980s, Reed upset Americans by swearing allegiance to Moscow while at the same time hinting that if folks were nice to him, he might even consider returning home for good. They weren’t. Following an appearance on CBS TV’s 60 Minutes show with famed anchorman Mike Wallace, furious American viewers called and wrote in to brand him a "Commie stooge".

Back in East Berlin, Reed’s third marriage, to East German actress Renate Blume, was in trouble. In a taped message made after the singer’s suicide, Blume’s voice is heard saying how, on two successive nights, she and Reed were involved in fierce arguments. The first night he tried slashing his wrists, the next night he left the bungalow in a temper with some of his belongings. That was, claimed the actress, the last she saw of him. Several days later his body was recovered from the lake, along with a suicide note.