Mapplethorpe connected art and arousal early on, experimenting with collages using stills from gay pornography magazines. Mr. Bailey and Mr. Barbato deftly reproduce his vision, showing how he edited the images, adding color and form, recalling both contemporary geometric art and classical sculpture.

These early works anticipate his most famous photos — sampled generously in the film — that could be rawly sexual and cool as marble. In an archival interview, Mapplethorpe likens his work to “being a sculptor without having to spend all the time modeling with your hands.”

The filmmakers capture his rise from every angle, using the artist’s own words and interviewing dozens of family members, friends, peers, models and lovers. (They also spend time with the curators of a retrospective that just opened in Los Angeles.) His contemporaries remember an ambitious, seductive man, charismatic, open and calculating. “He looked like a kind of ruined Cupid, and he was very reliant on his charm,” recalls the writer Fran Lebowitz. “He made great use of it.”

Even Mapplethorpe’s admirers say he could be deeply competitive and jealous. His younger brother Edward, a photographer himself, recalls Mapplethorpe insisting he use a professional pseudonym (“Edward Maxey”). But the subject is also far from the leering pornographer drawn by Senator Helms.

In a way, the film suggests that Senator Helms was not entirely wrong, insofar as Mapplethorpe’s photos aren’t not about sex — some of his models were also his lovers. But they aren’t only about sex, either. They’re about composition and form — just as his portraits and his striking still-lifes of flowers were. They were often the product of his Catholic upbringing, echoing scenes of martyred saints. They’re works of eros and art and life, from an artist who drew little distinction among them.