Relying heavily on “At Canaan’s Edge: America in the King Years, 1965-68,” the final book in Taylor Branch’s King trilogy (Mr. Branch is also an executive producer), the film portrays King as both dejected and rejected. He is disillusioned by the turn from civil rights to Black Power among a younger generation of African-Americans and the backlash he receives for protesting racial injustice in northern cities like Chicago, opposing the Vietnam War, and demanding fair pay and equitable working conditions for black laborers.

For Trey Ellis, an executive producer, presenting King not as a towering figure but as an outsider was part of what drew him to the project. King “actually outlived his legend,” Mr. Ellis said. “I think the documentary is really important in showing he did deal with contemporary issues we’re dealing with right now.” He added, ”Even when the press had turned against him, when black people turned against him and saw nonviolence as soft, and whites saw him as a communist. Even his own advisers were questioning him. He just put his head down and did the work.”

“King in the Wilderness” benefits from its counterintuitive approach. We see the continuing influence of King’s wife, Coretta, to carry on with his nonviolent philosophy, particularly his stance against the Vietnam War. In one compelling moment, Xernona Clayton, an event organizer for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, celebrates King’s birthday by giving him gag gifts that will help him when he’s arrested. King, though clearly tired, is tickled by the gesture.

In order to crystallize the moral courage of King’s nonviolence, however, all three films share an antipathy toward the Black Power movement that will fully blossom in 1968. For Jeanne Theoharis, author of “A More Beautiful and Terrible History: The Uses and Misuses of Civil Rights History,” such narratives present a two-dimensional sense of the relationship between the civil rights and Black Power movements and obscure how their conflicts existed earlier as well. “I think there are real debates going on in the mid-1960s in the black freedom struggle about black power,” she said. “Clearly not everyone is on the same page. Even if Malcolm X is super hated in the early 1960s, it doesn’t mean that King is loved.”