The film is loosely chronological but organized more by theme and personality — the issues The Review has chronicled, from civil rights to violence in the Middle East, and its stable of contributors, many of whom sit for interviews, including familiar names with perhaps unfamiliar faces, like Darryl Pinckney and Colm Toibin. In keeping with Mr. Silvers’s mission to make writing about books a way of writing about the world, Mr. Scorsese makes the history of the magazine a capsule intellectual history of the last half-century.

The challenge of making a documentary about the static, not very visual process of putting out a literary magazine is met, mostly, by moving quickly and fluidly (the editors were Paul Marchand and Michael J. Palmer) and by using archival footage of wars, riots and rallies whenever possible. In his excellent documentaries about Bob Dylan and George Harrison, Mr. Scorsese had music to fall back on; here he substitutes the spoken word with clips of writers reading from their essays in The Review.

He also sneaks in sentiment and ink-and-paper nostalgia with shots of Mr. Silvers in the office moving around stacks of books and marking up proofs. These scenes are full of young people carrying mail cartons and taking dictation, and you hope that one of them aspires to be the Robert Silvers or Barbara Epstein of 2063.