A new behind-the-scenes documentary about Martin Scorsese covers everything from his near death from drugs to the religious vision that shapes his work. It's essential viewing.

By the late 1970s, Martin Scorsese had partied through Hollywood so hard that his body was wrecked by drugs and he landed in hospital with internal bleeding. "I was dying," he says in Rebecca Miller's enthralling documentary series Mr Scorsese. His friend Robert De Niro came to his bedside, urging him one more time to make a film he'd been pushing for and that Scorsese had been adamantly rejecting. Scorsese recalls, "He looked at me and said, 'What the hell do you want to do? Do you want to die like this?'" And that's how Raging Bull was set in motion. The story ends happily, with photos of Scorsese and De Niro as we have never seen them before: holding pina coladas and wearing Hawaiian shirts and goofy tourist hats that say "St Maarten", the Caribbean island where they went to work on Paul Schrader's screenplay for the now-classic film.

In segments like that and many others, the intimacy and detail that Scorsese offers and Miller elicits add a fresh layer to a life story that could be an epic film in itself. The broad outlines of Scorsese's biography and career are well-known, from his Catholic childhood as an asthmatic movie-loving little boy in New York's Little Italy to films as different as Mean Streets (1973) and Killers of the Flower Moon (2023). But throughout five beautifully constructed episodes, Mr Scorsese plays like one reflective, often witty conversation. Scorsese, now 82, talks matter-of-factly about his professional and personal shortcomings, often laughing at himself. Miller (whose films include Personal Velocity and Maggie's Plan) is always off camera, but her voice is heard asking incisive questions. She had access to his archives and his friends, and smartly juxtaposes glimpses of his films with family photographs and comments from many of Scorsese's closest collaborators including De Niro, Leonardo DiCaprio, his long-time editor, Thelma Schoonmaker, and the screenwriter Paul Schrader.

Isabella Rossellini, the third of Scorsese's five wives, tells Miller, "I would say Marty is a saint/sinner" – saintly in the way he endlessly asks big questions about good and evil, but often acting badly. She has a point. What emerges most strongly here – the editing makes it a clear throughline – is a portrait of an artist obsessed with moral choices. He briefly studied to become a priest, and a constant questioning of where your moral compass takes you persists through his life and penetrates his films. "The problem is, you enjoy the sin," he says about the drug-fuelled years he has left behind. The fact that he uses religious terminology there – and later says that if you have a gift as a film-maker it's "a religious connection", a "sacred thing" – reveals a lot about how he sees the world. And that vision shapes his work. He helped transform cinema in the 20th Century........

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