In TV terms , the biographical film “Mike Wallace Is Here” is effectively a feature-length recap. Using only archival footage, the director Avi Belkin distills more than five decades of the longtime “60 Minutes” correspondent’s career on camera to an hour and a half. Presenting Wallace with relatively little mediation is a natural way to tell this story, even as it creates a limitation. Documentary as autobiography, the movie shows a man who is always cultivating his appearance for an audience.

“Mike Wallace Is Here” opens with a clip in which Wallace spars with Bill O’Reilly, who criticizes networks like CBS for being too stodgy, but credits Wallace with being the driving force behind his career. The film argues that Wallace was instrumental in creating a tougher style of interviewing on television (as a counterpoint, Belkin shows softball questioning from Edward R. Murrow), and Wallace’s drive to be taken seriously becomes a recurring thread. We are repeatedly shown how the former commercial actor (and pitchman for Philip Morris) was regarded by some news veterans as a creature of show business rather than as a serious journalist — and how he worked assiduously to dispel that idea.