The second episode opens with a humorous segment: the group disagreeing over where its name came from. It’s a reminder that “Of Mics and Men” is both historical record and personality sketch. And given the group’s fundamental unruliness, it is also an impressive feat of logistics. (Just ask any journalist ever tasked with interviewing the whole crew.)

RZA serves as something of an omniscient narrator, even for the parts where he’s at odds with other members. One of the most important reveals in the film is the nature of the tug-of-war between RZA and his brother Divine, who served as CEO of Wu-Tang Productions, the icy businessman behind the visceral music. When the group begins to splinter, RZA tells Divine to let everyone out of their contracts, essentially collapsing the company. Divine, sitting on his boat for a rare interview years later, remains incredulous.

The most heart-rending moments come in the third episode, which lingers on the decline and death of Ol’ Dirty Bastard, the jester whose tragic unraveling became a wound that the group could not bear. This was the mid-2000s, and almost everything was being filmed: Ol’ Dirty Bastard calling Divine to complain about being penniless after getting out of jail, and Ol’ Dirty Bastard’s new manager failing to recognize RZA when they first meet.

And then he’s gone. In many ways, that’s when the story of the Wu-Tang Clan ends as well — the group has released albums since then, but its centrality to the genre has vastly diminished. Its rootlessness is embodied in the fourth and final episode, which is unsure of the story it wants to tell: mistrust, instability, redemption.

In the early episodes, almost no time is spent on the group members’ solo albums, which include some of the most important music of the 1990s: Ghostface Killah’s “Ironman,” Raekwon’s “Only Built 4 Cuban Linx …” But several minutes are given to “Once Upon a Time in Shaolin,” the sole copy of which was auctioned off in 2015 for $2 million. The buyer was the reviled pharma bro Martin Shkreli, and, uncomfortably, he gets about as much screen time as Masta Killa, the group’s least visible member.

These days, the Wu-Tang Clan is an abstraction — a symbol, a logo, shorthand for a kind of unpredictability that mainstream hip-hop has largely abandoned. The group members only convene as a unit for business purposes, they admit. But to call this tale cautionary is to miss the point. As “Of Mics and Men” makes clear, survival itself is a kind of triumph.