“Good evening, ladies and gentleman. Welcome to my wake.”

As far as endings go — in life or at the movies — one couldn’t have planned for a better line and a more gung-ho curtain-fall. Yet it’s exactly what lay in store for Joseph Clement, the director of the new documentary Integral Man, when the subject of his story, James Stewart — one of Toronto’s wildest characters, a billionaire esthete doubling as a math professor — took control of his own script.

Having built Integral House, the most buzzed-about house in town since, well, Casa Loma — certainly the only home in Toronto that’s been lauded everywhere from the Wall Street Journal to the Daily Mail to Architectural Digest, and which the head of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City once called “one of the most important private houses built in North America in a long time” — Stewart wanted to bulletin his death in a very precise way. One last concert. One last bash. Before he succumbed.

Greeting his guests, just so, and giving them ironic licence, he started the proceedings one crisp December night in 2014: a finale of friends and associates in the main cavity of his 18,000-square-foot, Shim-Sutcliffe-designed home, which doubled then as an A-list concert hall, and had previously hosted greats like Philip Glass and boldface à la David Bowie.

The host donned a jazzy, Bordeaux-coloured blazer. Waiters — foxy young fellas in white shirts and skinny black suspenders — circled, as if in a Bob Fosse production. Measha Brueggergosman, the gusty soprano, did some of the elegiac honours. Tears were shed, as was a river of uneven laughter.

The “wake” is the stirring heart of Integral Man, making its world premiere on Tuesday at the Hot Docs festival. This not only adds to the lore of a man that’s only swelled since his untimely death from cancer, but cements the party as one of Toronto’s greatest of the last several decades.

In the same way you can’t separate the house from the man, you can’t separate the party from the mythology. And in this respect, the movie does Toronto a favour. For what is a great metropolis except the stories it tells itself, the gossip it manufactures about its characters, then sends down history’s chute? It’s certainly not a stack of buildings or a transportation system.

So ingrained is the 73-year-old’s swan-song bash in some local circles that a friend of his told me: “So many people like to say they were at that party. But it wasn’t really that much people. It’s like those people who like to say they were at Studio 54. As if.”

Does Stewart belong in Toronto’s Hall of Fame of introverted extroverts?

It was a question that wafted up for me when screening Integral Man. He was, it seems, a classic “ambivert” in the psychological parlance of our times. In a nutshell: a Capote-slight gay Canadian who made his moolah via the publication of mathematics textbooks, books that are standard issue everywhere from Brazil to China, which made him “the most published mathematician since Euclid.” Yet early on he dreamed of being a musician.

Eventually he fused all his passions with a house built not only according to calculus principles but so that it “unfolds” like a “piece of music,” as he tells it.

“I could not have built this house on a musician’s salary,” he says in the doc at one point, basking in his “accordion of wood and glass” (as the house has been called). It took 10 years to build and rises six storeys amongst the treetops leaning into a ravine. Situated in Toronto’s cushiest postal code in Rosedale, the edifice won a Governor-General’s Medal in Architecture.

For intrepid followers of the local papers, many of the details in the movie might be familiar, particularly in the rush of publicity when Stewart’s house went on the block after his death. (The initial asking price? $28 million.) But what really distinguishes the cinematic portrait — as it stretches from the initial conception of the house, to its construction, to its tah-dah — is the uncommon passion that pours from the man in the centre of it.

In this context, Stewart fits into a documentary genre that reminded me of two other men, in the winter of their lives, tracked in a pair of awesome movies from the last decade: the first one would be Jiro, the sushi master, in Jiro Dreams of Sushi, and the other, Bill Cunningham, the restless street-photographer for the New York Times, as seen inBill Cunningham New York.

Like the octogenarian Jiro, who relentlessly pursues his lifelong quest to create the perfect piece of sushi in Tokyo, or snowy-haired Bill, who has died since his doc, but who famously cycled around on his trusty two-wheel, ever trying to capture a moving expression of time and place, our man James was absolutely in love . . . with his house. So proud of building something of value and unassuming grace. He was simply engrossed by it.

Like those two men, there was also something of the loner about Stewart, embodied by an almost Howard Hughes-like desire to live in that giant house by himself.

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To coincide with the premiere of the movie, the world-famous house has once again been the centre of the action, both onscreen and off. There’s a party planned there before the premiere. Among those who will be accounted for: the makers of the film, the house’s architects (Brigitte Shim and Howard Sutcliffe) as well the new owners (financier Mark Machin and his wife, Melissa Mowbray-D’Arbela, who moved here after a stint in Hong Kong).

Home, after all, is where the doc is.

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