“Beautiful! Voluptuous! Deadly! Vicious!” As a movie star, Tura Satana was hardly prolific, but as a cult cinema icon the former go-go girl was already a legend long before her death in 2011 at the age of 72. Directed by Cody Jarrett, narrated by Margaret Cho, and perfectly timed for the 60th anniversary of her standout movie Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill! — in which she plays stunning black-leather-clad badass Varla — this playful but reverent and often quite unexpectedly moving documentary offers a fascinating portrait that reveals some of the late star’s secrets while generating a few new mysteries of its own. The prime audience is grindhouse movie buffs, for sure, but Jarrett’s film has more to talk about than such kitsch as the making of 1968’s The Astro Zombies, raising serious questions about the alarming state of race and gender in postwar America.

Boldly, the film gets off to a heavy start, revealing that the Satana — born Tura Luna Pascual Yamaguchi to a Japanese father and American mother — was raped by five local men in her Chicago stomping ground, just a few days away from her 10th birthday in 1948. The crime is recounted, in her own words, in chilling detail, but, as Jarrett goes on to show, Satana did not let the event define her. Rather, she saw it as a warning to toughen up and get ready to fight back; after all, internment was very much a recent memory, animosity for Pearl Harbor still hung in the air, and the young Satana knew that signs saying “This is a white man’s neighborhood” were not intended solely for African Americans.