Some crusading journalists write with a scalpel, others with a scythe. Molly Ivins, who famously called President George W. Bush “Shrub,” used both. She was funny and mean, clever and sincere; most of all she was political to the bone or at least that’s how she reads on the page and came across in talks. (She died in 2007.) Samples of each are scattered like acid-dipped chocolate nuggets throughout the hagiographic documentary “Raise Hell: The Life and Times of Molly Ivins .”

Whether you chuckle or snort will likely depend on your political persuasion, though it’s clear that the filmmakers aren’t aiming to seduce conservatives. This is a loving, at times fawning portrait aimed at the Ivins faithful — her “beloveds,” as she addressed her readers — who read her syndicated columns and best-selling books or showed up for her speeches. And while cuddling up to the adored one is a familiar biographical tactic, some critical distance might have made for a deeper, stronger movie.

The director Janice Engel gives “Raise Hell” such momentum — it’s a whoosh of a movie — that you are quickly swept up in its sights and sounds. There’s a lot to take in. (Engel clearly spent a heroic amount of time piecing the movie together with her editor and co-writer, Monique Zavistovski ; to judge from the pace, they might be coffee lovers.) Using the chronology of Ivins’s life as a narrative spine, Engel delivers the up-close and personal, deploying archival material and interviews to fill in a picture of a bookish child turned freethinker.

The movie follows Ivins’s professional and political evolutions, adding piquant details, quotes and testimonials along the way. Born in 1944, Mary Tyler Ivins grew up in a wealthy Houston suburb. Her father, Jim Ivins, was a conservative oil and gas executive who explained his choice of her first name by saying “if it’s good enough for the mother of God, it’s good enough for my daughter.” The movie makes it clear that he cast a large shadow over his daughter, who opted to call herself Molly. By contrast her mother, Margaret, scarcely registers. (The Wikipedia entry on Ivins doesn’t even mention the mom.)