If there ever was a personified salve to the chaos of our recent times, it might be Fred Rogers. Morgan Neville certainly thinks so.

It’s why the Oscar-winning filmmaker (“20 Feet From Stardom”) made his new documentary — “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?” — to revisit a voice he says no longer exists in our culture when we perhaps need it most.

Mister Rogers, though, is gone. The Presbyterian minister and creator and host of the decades-long children’s television show “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood,” known for its puppets and songs of unconditional acceptance, died in 2003.

But his memory lives on, and the cultural figure he carved as the soft-spoken, cardigan-clad and saint-like model of humanity has perhaps only grown recently. Rogers and his vision of love and kindness have become revered as a sort of last glimmer of hope — the remaining voice of universal comfort, echoing from the dead, in a country racked by cultural and political turmoil.

That’s certainly what it feels like watching Neville’s appropriately sentimental film, which examines Rogers’ philosophy and his deep respect for children, channeled through the relatively young medium of television. Amid the standard talking heads, the film’s archival footage of Rogers in interviews and on his show often have a jarring effect; there is a feeling of purity in the full-bodied warmth and caring emanating from Rogers that, in our current context, seems to have died with him.

“Who are the people who really care?” Neville says on a Saturday morning at the Fairmont Hotel. “Everybody is worrying about the next quarter or the next election cycle. Having that sense of unadulterated trust with somebody who you knew wasn’t trying to game you and has no other agenda” — that is the rare feeling singular to Rogers and his memory.

The myriad anecdotes of him indicate as much. For a period, Rogers received more letters than anyone in the country, each of which he saved and personally responded to. The earliest seed of the film originates in a memory of Rogers’ empathy from cellist Yo-Yo Ma, who had worked with Neville on a documentary years earlier.

“I happened to ask him, ‘How did you figure out how to be a famous person?’” Neville says. “He said, ‘Oh, Mr. Rogers taught me.’ And I kind of laughed, and he said, ‘I’m not kidding.’” Rogers, sensing the harsh light of fame thrust upon a former child prodigy, mentored Ma after he appeared on the “Neighborhood.”

In this way, Rogers’ palpable kindness inspires a distinctly visceral effect. At one point, the film shows a woman who’d watched “Mister Rogers” as a child meeting the man and immediately bursting into tears, as if reverting back to her childish self. That infantilization, channeling our most vulnerable versions of ourselves, is a process Neville has seen time and time again in others while making and screening the film.

“Most of us have a relationship with him that predates not only our adulthood, but really even our sense of self,” Neville says. “If the show is for 2- to 6-year-olds, then a lot of our relationship with him exists in our pre-memory. It exists in a place that is kind of subconscious.”

It’s this Rogers effect that makes him such a uniquely powerful subject in divisive times, Neville says. “When we watched ‘Mister Rogers’ as kids, we weren’t Republicans or Democrats. We had no labels to us. We were just children.”

Yet as much as he embodied this form of transcendent altruism, the common misconception, one that the film dissects, is that Rogers existed on a separate plane. Rogers’ wife, Joanne, alluded to this when meeting with Neville to discuss rights, which had never been granted in such a way before this film.

“As we were finishing our first meeting, she said, ‘You know, don’t make Fred a saint, because he wasn’t one,’” Neville recalls. “What I think she meant by that was, to think of Fred as a saintly person is to somehow absolve the rest of us from having to have a responsibility to live up to it. He worked hard at it, he struggled with it.”

The film provides glimpses into self-doubt about Rogers’ own goodness and the mission of his show, which, in its radical lessons on topics like assassination (responding to JFK’s murder), is shown to have been a carefully considered machine. Rogers met every week with a child development psychologist and would re-film sequences for old episodes to update innocent remarks he made that he worried were unattuned to changing social politics.

This level of self-scrutiny becomes an answer to an underlying question of the film: How would he respond to current times?

A fundamentally optimistic person, Rogers would likely be disheartened — he already appeared to be in his later years — but would still want to understand and empathize, Neville says. The more important answer, though, might be in the audience.

“The question I get a lot is, ‘Well, who is the new Mr. Rogers?’ And I think: There is no new Mr. Rogers, and there never will be,” he says. “Yet I feel like that thing he maybe left in the millions of us that watched him is the legacy of who he is today. That it’s us, and it’s up to us.”

Brandon Yu is a Bay Area freelance writer.

Won’t You Be My Neighbor? (PG-13) opens Friday, June 8, in Bay Area theaters.