Perhaps there’s never been a finer caricature of a drummer than Animal, the beetle-browed, flaming red cave-man of The Muppets. Frank Oz, who performed Animal for a quarter of a century, summed him up in five words: sex, sleep, food, drums, and pain.

For all his manic violence, for all the regressive woman-chasing and furniture-smashing, there was a single, undeniable, balancing truth about Animal: he was a superb drummer.

In sketch after sketch over the years, Animal went toe-to-toe with some of the finest living drummers — only to chase them off stage for “being awful.”

Chained like a wild beast to his drum set, Animal would unleash a kind of incandescent primitive energy, his foam limbs and drumsticks a chaotic blur. His anarchic beats were like timed explosions. He drove the music — he was its voltage, sparking like a downed electrical wire — but in a way that threatened to burn down the house.

Of course, I loved him. Kermit and Fozzie Bear were all well and good, in a hyper-civilized, avuncular, neutered kind of way, but every once in a while, the show needed a dose of old-fashioned id. Animal was always happy to oblige.

Animal sprang to mind, unbidden, in the opening scenes of the 2012 documentary, Beware of Mr. Baker, a profile of the British drummer Ginger Baker which is available on demand through Netflix, or for rental on Amazon Instant Video. I wasn’t familiar with Mr. Baker’s name, but I knew some of his work from the 1960s supergroup Cream. Cream was a trio: Jack Bruce on vocals and bass; Eric Clapton on vocals and guitar; and in the background, pounding away on his drums like a red-headed demon who has traded his soul for superhuman musical chops, a tall, cadaverous, heroin-addled Ginger Baker.

Mr. Baker enjoyed a reputation as a ferocious and brilliant drummer, a musician who’d cut his teeth in the world of jazz, but had made the transition to rock and roll by way of a study of African beats. He inspired a generation of percussionists; in the film, a who’s who of rock drummers testifies to his genius. He was a towering figure, a master time-keeper who knew how to channel otherworldy energies through his drums, galvanizing the other musicians on stage and driving stadium-size audiences out of their senses. His performances were monumental. But just as epic was his behavior off-stage. He was a cruelly indifferent husband and father, abandoning his family to poverty while he jetted in luxury around the world, hip-deep in groupies and drugs. He was full of rage, ready to turn his fists on fans, journalists, his band-mates, his own son — anyone who stood between himself and his pleasure.

A world-class drummer, utterly out of control. In other words, Animal incarnate.

Mr. Baker’s musical restlessness took him all over the world, including the unlikely locale of Lagos, Nigeria, where, for a while, he affiliated himself with the great Fela Kuti, the courageous political dissident and pioneer of Afrobeat. Mr. Baker built a studio in Lagos in 1970 to record with local musicians, a full fifteen years before Paul Simon went to South Africa and “discovered” the African sound that powered the album Graceland.

For Mr. Baker, musicianship was the supreme value. The color of a man’s skin was of no interest to him. This is what enabled him to penetrate Fela Kuti’s insular world at a time when racism was the social norm. But it’s precisely the same metric that drove his hateful and dismissive attitude towards other musicians. Something else emerges in the film: the most reliable target of Mr. Baker’s murderous loathing was none other than Ginger Baker himself — except when he was sitting behind his drums and playing well.

The filmmaker, a humorous, if somewhat bland fellow, is constantly on the receiving end of Mr. Baker’s wrath. The film opens and closes with a scene where he’s getting bashed in the nose with Mr. Baker’s metal cane — all for presuming to interview other people to help round out the documentary. Mr. Baker isn’t interested in what other people have to say about him. Whatever tenderness he has is reserved for his polo horses and dogs.

There would be no rock stars without the Romantic movement, and no Romantic movement without Lord Byron. Beware of Mr. Baker paints its subject as a classic Byronic hero: “proud, moody, cynical, with defiance on his brow and misery in his heart, a scorner of his kind, implacable in revenge, yet capable of deep and strong affection.”

Better yet, tag Mr. Baker with the phrase Lady Caroline Lamb used to describe Lord Byron himself — the original bad boy of Romanticism, the first “pop star” — before she lost her heart to his poetry: “He is mad, bad, and dangerous to know.”