She talks about her parents, who came north as part of the Great Migration, and her childhood in Lorain, Ohio, a working-class town where African-Americans and white people, many of them immigrants, lived as neighbors. She talks about attending Howard University, where she had a good time (“I was loose,” she says with a smile) and began to turn her lifelong love of reading into a vocation. She talks about working in publishing, in Syracuse and then in Manhattan, and about rising early, as the single mother of two young sons, to work on her first novel. She talks about resisting the primacy of the white gaze, and about the challenge and reward of imagining black lives on their and her own terms.

The people who talk about her include Angela Davis, Oprah Winfrey, Fran Lebowitz, Sonia Sanchez and Robert Gottlieb, who was her colleague at Random House and became the editor of nearly all her novels. Of those, “The Bluest Eye,” “Sula,” “Song of Solomon” and of course “Beloved” receive the most attention. But the film also, inevitably, holds them at a distance. We see a few clips from Jonathan Demme’s 1998 screen version of “Beloved,” and 19th-century engravings that evoke the real-life incident that informed the book, but the difficulty of its narrative and the magic of its prose are left mainly outside the frame.

A handful of tone-deaf reviews and polemics are mentioned, including a notice in this newspaper that found her emphasis on black lives “narrow” in its focus. The mid-1980s dust-up that followed a petition signed by prominent black authors urging that Morrison be given a major literary prize is revisited, as are some of the grumpy responses that greeted her Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993. Those storms seem distant now; Morrison in the present looks like a figure who has risen above the vicissitudes of reputation. She is beyond dispute.