Avant-garde theater director Robert Wilson is profiled in this worshipful documentary, in which filmmaker Katharina Otto is so reverent about her subject that the film doesn’t actually offer a true understanding of what it is Wilson does on stage. Instead, we see clips and comments from New York theater critics, Wilson’s relatives and colleagues and admirers such as Susan Sontag. We learn quite a bit about Wilson’s strict Texas upbringing, his unusual theater work with disabled young men and his breakthrough show Einstein On the Beach, created with Philip Glass. Otto moves rather quickly, however, through Wilson’s biggest latter-day international successes, which were collaborations with rock composers Tom Waits and Lou Reed, who are sadly missing as talking heads here (Waits is present only in vintage footage).

Shelf Talk: The documentary received good reviews in its arthouse run and is currently attracting attention through an airing on Cinemax. Like the recent Matthew Barney documentary No Restraint, Absolute Wilson’s advantage for its core audience of theater aficionados is that it offers (mostly brief) views of material that hasn’t been available as home entertainment.