Burnham’s foil, and Mr. Kirchheimer’s hero, was another Chicago architect: Louis Sullivan, a brilliant draftsman and theoretician often identified as the father of the modern skyscraper. (“Tall” comes with the subtitle “The American Skyscraper and Louis Sullivan.”) Famous for declaring that “form must ever follow function,” Sullivan tried to find an organic, authentic identity for modern tall buildings. While hardly averse to ornament, he envisioned each structure as a dialectic of utility and beauty. His great disciple, Frank Lloyd Wright, would extend Sullivan’s philosophy in his own writings and architectural projects.

That philosophy is understood in “Tall” to be quintessentially American, partaking of the same democratic spirit that breathes in the writings of Emerson and Whitman. Sullivan appears as a prophet without much honor in his own country, denied the celebrity and the lucrative commissions enjoyed by the Europe-besotted Burnham.

According to Mr. Kirchheimer (whose lucid and erudite narration is read by the actor Dylan Baker), the glass-and-steel boxes of the post-World War II International Style are part of Burnham’s legacy rather than Sullivan’s. “Tall,” though it was completed in 2006, ends its story several decades earlier, before the advent of postmodernist styles that might have complicated its tidy argument. But the film is useful in part because it is so frankly argumentative. The critical appreciation of art is always advanced more effectively by partisanship than by neutrality.