Mr Scorsese review: This series about the great US film-maker is a must-watch

A new behind-the-scenes documentary about Martin Scorsese covers everything from his near death from drugs to the religious vision that shapes his work. It's essential viewing.

By the late 1970s, Martin Scorsese had partied through Hollywood so hard that his body was wrecked by drugs and he landed in hospital with internal bleeding. "I was dying," he says in Rebecca Miller's enthralling documentary series Mr Scorsese. His friend Robert De Niro came to his bedside, urging him one more time to make a film he'd been pushing for and that Scorsese had been adamantly rejecting. Scorsese recalls, "He looked at me and said, 'What the hell do you want to do? Do you want to die like this?'" And that's how Raging Bull was set in motion. The story ends happily, with photos of Scorsese and De Niro as we have never seen them before: holding pina coladas and wearing Hawaiian shirts and goofy tourist hats that say "St Maarten", the Caribbean island where they went to work on Paul Schrader's screenplay for the now-classic film.

In segments like that and many others, the intimacy and detail that Scorsese offers and Miller elicits add a fresh layer to a life story that could be an epic film in itself. The broad outlines of Scorsese's biography and career are well-known, from his Catholic childhood as an asthmatic movie-loving little boy in New York's Little Italy to films as different as Mean Streets (1973) and Killers of the Flower Moon (2023). But throughout five beautifully constructed episodes, Mr Scorsese plays like one reflective, often witty conversation. Scorsese, now 82, talks matter-of-factly about his professional and personal shortcomings, often laughing at himself. Miller (whose films include Personal Velocity and Maggie's Plan) is always off camera, but her voice is heard asking incisive questions. She had access to his archives and his friends, and smartly juxtaposes glimpses of his films with family photographs and comments from many of Scorsese's closest collaborators including De Niro, Leonardo DiCaprio, his long-time editor, Thelma Schoonmaker, and the screenwriter Paul Schrader.

Isabella Rossellini, the third of Scorsese's five wives, tells Miller, "I would say Marty is a saint/sinner" – saintly in the way he endlessly asks big questions about good and evil, but often acting badly. She has a point. What emerges most strongly here – the editing makes it a clear throughline – is a portrait of an artist obsessed with moral choices. He briefly studied to become a priest, and a constant questioning of where your moral compass takes you persists through his life and penetrates his films. "The problem is, you enjoy the sin," he says about the drug-fuelled years he has left behind. The fact that he uses religious terminology there – and later says that if you have a gift as a film-maker it's "a religious connection", a "sacred thing" – reveals a lot about how he sees the world. And that vision shapes his work. He helped transform cinema in the 20th Century with bold, thoughtful films like Taxi Driver (1976) and Goodfellas (1990), which blend a kinetic, virtuosic style with a visceral grasp of the dark but thrilling currents of bad behaviour.

The series' earliest episodes set up the enduring influence of Scorsese's formative years. Miller interviews friends he hung out with as a child, some more prone to trouble than others. One friend's brother – Salvatore Uricola, known as Sally Gaga back then – became a model for De Niro's hot-headed character, Johnny Boy, in Mean Streets, which is set in Scorsese's old neighbourhood. "Did you blow up a mailbox?" Miller asks. "Yeah," Sally Gaga says, as we see a split screen of him and a grinning Johnny Boy running from an exploding mailbox in the film.

Scorsese's father kept his nose clean, but often had to intervene to save his brother, the film-maker's uncle, Joe "The Bug" Scorsese, the other inspiration for Johnny Boy. I thought I knew Scorsese's story well, but I had never heard about Joe the Bug. Along the way, Scorsese adds surprising details about how his boyhood still affects his art. His asthma kept him indoors, looking out from an upper floor window onto the street. "That's why I like high-angle shots," he says.

The documentary offers a reminder that his career has had more ups and downs than most people might think, now that he is acclaimed as one of the greatest living film-makers. De Niro urged him to make The King of Comedy (1982) and again Scorsese reluctantly agreed. But he sometimes didn't show up on set until the afternoon. "I didn't want to be there," he says. The film, with De Niro as the celebrity-stalking Rupert Pupkin, is now considered a brilliant, ahead-of-its-time take on fame and fan obsession, but it was a box-office disaster. Scorsese came back, but more than a decade later, the commercial flops of Kundun (1997) and Bringing Out the Dead (1999) made his career, as he puts it, "dead again". DiCaprio had the clout to get Gangs of New York (2002) made, reversing that latest setback.

Apple TV+

It's also easy to forget how controversial some of his films were, often because of their violence, notably Taxi Driver and its rampaging anti-hero Travis Bickle. Scorsese says that when he read Schrader's screenplay it was "almost as if I had written it myself". Miller asks, "What of you, in that moment, do you feel is in that film most?" He pauses and answers carefully, making it clear that he does not act like or condone Travis Bickle, then says, "The anger, the loneliness, no way of really connecting with people" – the sense of being an outsider that he again links to a working-class background that made him an odd fit in New York University film school and in Hollywood. "Violence is scary in yourself. Are you capable of it?" he reflects, adding that violence on screen is a positive thing "if it's truthful violence". Taxi Driver exploded into the headlines again in 1981 when John Hinckley, obsessed with Jodie Foster as a child prostitute in the film, shot Ronald Reagan. The Academy Awards were postponed by a day after the shooting, and Rossellini recalls that Scorsese wore a bullet-proof vest to the Oscars.

The documentary doesn't dwell on Scorsese's private life. He admits that work made him a distant father to the older two of his three children from different marriages, all of whom are interviewed here and are on good terms with him. But he was there for Francesca, his youngest child, who has recently made him a TikTok star with videos like Dad Guesses Slang.

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And when Scorsese is circumspect, Miller deftly adds more information. He says he had panic attacks while making Gangs of New York because, among other vague reasons, "people are sick". Miller inserts a photo of his wife, Helen, to whom he has been married for 26 years. As Francesca later explains, her mother was diagnosed with Parkinson's even before that. A brief glimpse of the three of them at home is as personal as the documentary gets about his life today.

There's only so much a documentary can do even in five hours. What Schrader calls in connection to Taxi Driver a "Madonna/whore problem" has never completely disappeared from Scorsese's career. He doesn't judge the sexual women in his films, like Margot Robbie's character in The Wolf of Wall Street (2013), but the dichotomy persists, evident in Lily Gladstone's irreproachable heroine in Killers of the Flower Moon. The series might have done more to explore that complicated dynamic. But such lapses are minor in a series so rich with insights and so bracing in the way it lets us see Scorsese today, vital and still at work. 

Mr Scorsese is available on Apple TV+ from October 17.

★★★★★

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