Multiple people say that he was effectively a god in Naples at the height of his popularity. In public life, Maradona didn’t act like a man of humble origins. From the monstrous cache of 1980s and ’90s videotape that Kapadia has assembled, we see a curly maned nightclub hound who was happy to play the part of a high-living party animal.

In the 2011 film “Senna” (about the racecar driver Ayrton Senna) and the Oscar-winning “Amy” (on Amy Winehouse), Kapadia demonstrated that he was a formidable spelunker of archives. That’s just as true here. It helps that Maradona (still alive in his late 50s) left plenty of camera-mugging for Kapadia to work with. It also helps that his life followed the rough contours of a Scorsese movie.

As Kapadia’s film tells it, Maradona’s increased exposure coincided with ballooning irresponsibility (he fathered a son he didn’t acknowledge for three decades). We’re told that a ferocious cocaine habit indebted him to the Neapolitan mob. Maradona’s world became a tinderbox that only true temerity could ignite. For Maradona, that boldly stupid gesture came when he played for Argentina against Italy, in Italy, in the 1990 World Cup — and played well.

Part of Kapadia’s achievement in “Diego Maradona” is that he has edited cruddy video footage (some of which appears barely more than camcorder-grade) and photographs into a movie so fluid that it moves like a Hollywood production. He also dispenses with much of the filler common to documentaries. Interviews that other filmmakers might show as talking heads are simply heard in voice-over, complementing or illustrating the archival imagery, of which this film seems to have squeezed in more per minute of runtime than most. The result is a movie that, for better or worse, takes a bit more than two hours to watch and feels twice as full.

But perhaps “Diego Maradona,” like Diego Maradona, simply had to be a movie of contradictions. It is exhausting and exhilarating, cheap looking and slick, a documentary for Maradona fans but also for many others besides.

Diego Maradona

Not rated. In English, Spanish and Italian, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 10 minutes.