Watching George Harrison: Living in the Material World, Martin Scorsese’s new documentary about the noted Beatle, mantra chanter, horticulturist, Formula One fan, film producer, Traveling Wilbury, and ukulele enthusiast, you’re struck by the sheer breadth of experience that was crammed into a mere 58 3/4 years of corporeal existence. But then, Harrison was really about 250 years old in normal-person years.

“George didn’t like boundaries, and time was one of those big boundaries he didn’t like—it was stretched and twisted by him,” says his widow, Olivia, a co-producer of the film, which will air over two nights, October 5 and 6, on HBO. (Abrams is publishing a companion volume of the same title, for which Olivia has selected the photographs.) Indeed, Harrison seemed to age in reverse from the 70s onward, from the haggard and hirsute figure suffering from Post-Beatles Stress Disorder to the more reconciled, gardening-blissed fellow he was in middle age.

Living in the Material World hits all the requisite rockumentary marks: exquisitely curated dips into the news and concert archives, a forthright acknowledgment of the “Layla” business by Eric Clapton and Pattie Boyd, and fresh interviews with Ringo Starr, Paul McCartney (in especially thoughtful and funny form), George Martin, Ravi Shankar, Yoko Ono, Eric Idle, Terry Gilliam, and even a pre-incarceration Phil Spector. But it’s the family footage and the interviews with Olivia and her now adult son by Harrison, Dhani, that are the most affecting—not because they offer a voyeuristic glimpse into the life of a notoriously private man but because they capture a bit of his questing, mischievous essence.

“He was a naughty boy, you know—an artist, a pirate,” Olivia says. “But his meditation left him well prepared for his death. He said he was ready to leave his body. He was always a ‘No need to panic’ kind of person.”