Mr. Scorsese, Rebecca Miller’s five-part documentary series on Martin Scorsese, unfolds like an extended insight. It is a sprawling chronicle of the veteran filmmaker’s life and his perception of the art of cinema that feels at once intimate and canonical. As documentaries about living film legends go, it is formally conservative: a familiar collage of archival footage, film clips, and talking heads, intercut with new interviews with Scorsese, his collaborators, family, and friends. Yet Miller’s approach possesses something many such tributes lack — patience. She allows the material to breathe, letting its digressions accumulate meaning. What emerges is not merely a biography of an American filmmaker but a study of the restless life of an artist perpetually caught between the sacred and the profane, the camera and the confessional.
The first episode, which traces Scorsese’s early years, resists the temptation to mythologize Little Italy right away. Instead, Miller begins in Corona, Queens. A lesser-known chapter in the director’s life but one that proves formative. Here, the young Martin’s world was hemmed in by asthma and the stifling heat of tenement summers. Unable to play with other children, he watched the street through windowpanes, as a boy in isolation, already learning to frame the world. Those images of glass and enclosure, Miller reminds us, will later recur throughout his work, from Taxi Driver to The Age of Innocence. A neighborhood quarrel between his father and a landlord, witnessed at close quarters, would one day reappear in Raging Bull. Such connections could have felt forced, but Miller’s careful and unhurried voice lets them unfold naturally, as if the young Scorsese were slowly writing the grammar of his own cinematic language.
His asthma, ironically, became his passport to the movies. During summer months, when his parents couldn’t afford proper cooling, the family sought refuge in the air-conditioned movie palaces of New York. There, amid double features and the Italian neorealist imports that flickered on television, Scorsese found his alternate childhood. By the time he enrolled at NYU to study filmmaking, he had already begun translating the sights and sins of his neighborhood into narrative. His student film What’s a Nice Girl Like You Doing in a Place Like This? nearly collapsed after the editor botched the negative. A minor disaster that introduced him to Thelma Schoonmaker, the classmate who would later become his lifelong editor and creative counterpart. Miller lingers lovingly on this detail. The origin of a collaboration that would stretch across half a century, a marriage of precision and volatility.
The second episode follows Scorsese’s uneasy migration to Hollywood in the early seventies. By then he had made Who’s That Knocking at My Door? with Harvey Keitel and The Big Shave, as his allegorical protest against the Vietnam War. But he found himself adrift after Boxcar Bertha, a genre assignment that John Cassavetes famously scolded him for. “You just spent a year of your life making a piece of shit,” Cassavetes told him. It became an admonition that would haunt Scorsese and shape his resolve. Miller shows him at this crossroads. He was too idiosyncratic for Hollywood, and too ambitious for the margins. Yet out of this tension came Mean Streets, his breakthrough film and a distillation of everything he knew. Friendship, guilt, violence, and the electric chaos of urban life. Nicholas Pileggi, his future collaborator, observes that Scorsese’s characters are always outsiders trying to score. A reflection of a director who entered the system only to challenge its hierarchies from within.
The following episodes trace Scorsese’s ascent and his near self-destruction with candor. Taxi Driver (1976) brought him global acclaim, by winning the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, box-office success, and eventually four nominations at the 49th Academy Awards. The success deepened his intensity that would later consume him. Miller handles the cocaine-fueled years with restraint, letting De Niro and Schoonmaker speak with a kind of familial grief. It was De Niro, after all, who persuaded the ailing Scorsese to make Raging Bull, a project that would become both redemption and reckoning. Miller treats this not as a comeback narrative but as an exorcism. A film about pain made by a man learning to survive it. Scorsese’s recollection of watching himself dissolve into obsession, followed by the serenity of editing the film with Schoonmaker, is among the documentary’s most moving passages.
The fourth part turns to The Last Temptation of Christ, a film that nearly ended his career. Miller captures the firestorm of protest that surrounded it. The boycotts, the bans, the anti-Semitic accusations. Scorsese, visibly wearied, recalls how the outrage seemed less about theology than about the audacity of doubt. It’s here that the documentary gains its moral force. By juxtaposing the controversy with the ecstasy of Goodfellas (1990), Miller shows how faith and violence coexist in his cinema, as both are born from the same longing for transcendence. The episode ends with the sense that Goodfellas was not just a return to form but a vindication, the moment when Scorsese stopped seeking permission and began following his own commandments.
The final episode brings us into the twilight, not as decline but as continuation. With Leonardo DiCaprio, Scorsese found a new muse and a mirror for his later concerns: guilt, ambition, the cost of power. Gangs of New York, The Aviator, The Departed — these are treated not as trophies but as chapters in a sustained meditation on corruption and grace. Miller allows time to slow as we reach the present day. We see Scorsese tending to his wife, Helen Schermerhorn Morris, who now lives with Parkinson’s disease, and speaking tenderly about his daughters, who describe their unconventional upbringing without bitterness. His latest works, The Irishman (2019) and Killers of the Flower Moon (2023), made for streaming platforms, are framed as elegies. Miller seems aware that her subject is contemplating mortality but resists turning the series into a farewell. Instead, she treats it as a continuation of his lifelong argument with time.
Much of the information in Mr. Scorsese is familiar, such as the childhood asthma, the Catholic guilt, the legendary temper. But what distinguishes Miller’s documentary is tone. It maintains a delicate balance between admiration and inquiry. She neither sanctifies nor psychoanalyzes him. Instead, she lets the contradictions stand. We understand why violence pervades his work, because he witnessed it early, in domestic arguments and neighborhood brawls. But we also see his tenderness, the priestly calm that descends when he speaks about editing or rhythm. There are gaps, of course. His less celebrated films like After Hours, Kundun, Bringing Out the Dead, amongst others receive fleeting mentions, though they might have offered richer insights into his thematic obsessions. Yet this selectivity seems less an oversight than an editorial choice to keep the series within the pulse of his most enduring works.
By the end, Mr. Scorsese feels more like a solemn tribute than a documentary. Its subject, ever animated by the fear of moral failure, comes across as a man still making sense of his vocation. “Cinema,” he says at one point, “is how I pray.” In Miller’s hands, that confession reverberates, not as an act of piety, but as a declaration of endurance. The docu-series may not tell us much we didn’t already know, but it reminds us why his story still matters, for at its core it is a story of survival, both artistic, moral, and human.
