Mr. Scorsese’ portrays a flawed and sympathetic genius

There is a moment in Mr. Scorsese — quiet, almost throwaway — when the legendary filmmaker, sitting in a dark editing suite surrounded by reels of his past, murmurs, “You spend your life chasing the picture in your head, and when you finally catch it, you realize it’s caught you instead.” That sentence encapsulates what this film is about. Directed by longtime collaborator Thelma Schoonmaker and shaped through hours of new interviews and archival footage, Mr. Scorsese isn’t a conventional documentary or a victory lap. It is, instead, a reckoning.

The film begins not in Hollywood, but in Little Italy, the neighborhood that shaped the man who would later define American cinema. Grainy black-and-white photographs flicker by as Scorsese’s voice recalls asthma attacks, Catholic guilt, and the dangerous beauty of the streets below his family’s apartment. “It was like a movie before I ever made one,” he says. From those early moments, Mr. Scorsese frames its subject not just as a filmmaker, but as a man forever trying to reconcile sin and salvation through art.

Where many retrospectives smooth over the rough edges of genius, Schoonmaker’s film leans into them. Scorsese comes across as painfully honest, sometimes to the point of discomfort. He speaks openly about his failures — both creative and personal — from the critical pummeling of New York, New York to the near-fatal collapse during his cocaine addiction in the early ’80s. “I thought I could edit my life like I edited my films,” he confesses at one point. “But the cuts don’t heal the same way.”

The film’s structure mirrors the tempo of Scorsese’s own storytelling — kinetic, musical, alive with guilt and grace. Each chapter pairs a defining movie with a corresponding chapter of his life: Mean Streets with his early anger; Taxi Driver with his obsession over moral decay; The Last Temptation of Christ with his search for forgiveness. Through this framework, Mr. Scorsese becomes not a biography, but a confessional. The films are treated as diary entries, glimpses into a man who used cinema not to entertain, but to understand himself.

What elevates the documentary beyond mere hagiography is its refusal to shy away from the contradictions of its subject. Scorsese is portrayed as obsessive, sometimes difficult, often distant — a man who demands everything from his collaborators and even more from himself. Leonardo DiCaprio recalls a 12-hour shoot on The Aviator where Scorsese refused to stop until a single glance felt true. “He sees the world in cuts and frames,” DiCaprio says. “But sometimes he forgets to see himself in them.” That tension — between genius and guilt, between the perfectionist and the penitent — forms the emotional spine of the film.

There are moments of humor too, often self-deprecating. Scorsese jokes about his height (“I always had to stand on a box to direct De Niro”), his neuroses (“I storyboard my grocery shopping”), and his mother’s appearances in his films (“She had better timing than most actors I worked with”). These flashes of warmth prevent the film from sinking into self-pity. Instead, they remind us that Scorsese’s greatest gift — beyond his technical mastery — is his empathy. Even when depicting the darkest corners of humanity, he always finds something worth redeeming.

Schoonmaker, who has edited Scorsese’s films for over five decades, stitches together new footage with behind-the-scenes material from Raging Bull, Goodfellas, and Silence. Her cuts are both affectionate and ruthless, capturing her subject’s vulnerability with the same precision she once applied to his gangsters and saints. The editing rhythms mimic memory itself — looping, overlapping, contradicting. At times, Scorsese argues with his younger self, the present-day version watching old interviews with a mixture of pride and regret. “He thought he knew everything,” he says, half-smiling. “Maybe he did. Maybe he didn’t.”

Cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto brings a painterly sensibility to the new sequences, bathing Scorsese’s face in soft amber light that evokes both nostalgia and exhaustion. The camera lingers on his hands, his eyes, the silver gleam of the editing scissors — tools of a man who has spent his life cutting reality into meaning. Robbie Robertson’s music (recorded before his death in 2023) provides a soulful throughline, its bluesy pulse underscoring both the melancholy and the defiance that define Scorsese’s worldview.

The film’s final act is its most moving. We see Scorsese visiting the graves of old collaborators — De Niro’s father, Michael Powell, and even his late mother, Catherine. He speaks of mortality with the same curiosity he once reserved for cinema. “Maybe that’s the final shot,” he says softly. “You fade out, but you hope the story keeps running somewhere else.” In that moment, Mr. Scorsese transcends the boundaries of documentary. It becomes a prayer — for art, for memory, for forgiveness.

And yet, the film refuses to canonize him. Schoonmaker ensures that Scorsese remains human, flawed, and restless. The documentary’s title, Mr. Scorsese, is intentionally ironic — both respectful and distanced, as though even after half a century, the man remains a mystery to himself. We are left not with answers, but with the same questions that have driven his entire career: Can art save us? Can storytelling absolve us? And what happens when the camera finally stops rolling?

In the end, Mr. Scorsese is less about movies than about mortality. It’s about what it costs to dedicate your life to the act of creation — and how even the greatest among us must live with what they leave behind. As the credits roll, Scorsese whispers, “I’m still trying to find the ending.” It’s the most fitting closing line he could ever write.

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