An ordained minister in Pittsburgh, Mr. Rogers (1928-2003) is the show-runner and host of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, a children’s program of PBS, ran from 1968 to 2001. What singularly distinguishes Mr. Rogers from his coevals is his affable persona (which is almost too good-natured to invite skepticism that it is just a front in front of the camera) and his far-reaching, forward-looking philosophy that “every child is inherently special” and he in earnest, “loves each and every kid in the way they are”. And Neville’s quasi-cradle-to-grave documentary makes an eloquent case of lionizing Mr. Rogers, it is a hagiography, but indeed, for such a saintlike figure, the “h” word is fair and square.

Collating Rogers’ own footage (of the show, his interview and other televised occasions, predominantly the one during 1969 US Senate Subcommittee on Communications, modulated by John Pastore, his cogent testimony which secured funding for PBS at then), the usual talking heads of his family, friends and colleagues, doling out succinct comments, recollections or anecdotes, with children-friendly snippets of animation, WON’T YOU BE MY NEIGHBOR? comprehensively encompasses almost all the hot-button topics and accidents during Mr. Rogers’ life: consumerism, racism, warfare, homosexuality, JFK’s assassination, The Challenger disaster, among others.

By conventional estimation, those aforementioned issues are simply not apposite for the show’s key demo (roughly toddler to preteen), but Mr. Rogers knows better and in the movie’s very first scene, he frankly muses that a young child needs certain modulations to prepare them for the real world, thus he becomes their modulator, inculcating cracker-barrel nuggets through his show, the Neighborhood of Making-Believe and his trademark puppetry, without dumbing down their nuts and bolts of. On that aspect, an affable Mr. Rogers is an indomitable force, and his endeavor’s vast beneficence is validated by the massive popularity he has amassed spanning over three decades.

Of course, one of the major curiosities lies in Mr. Rogers’ almost inconceivable all-around decency as a human being, which does not tally with our time-honored conviction that each person is a complex entity, what is Mr. Rogers’ dark side? That is a question the documentary tactfully evades, but on a second thought, if one’s dark side is rather disproportional compared to their oceanic goodness and sageness, why should anyone want to be a fault-finding rubbernecker? At the end of the day, it is Mr. Rogers’ indiscriminately wholesome christianity that gets the best of any dyed-in-the-wool cynics, WON’T YOU BE MY NEIGHBOR? is like its subjects, soft-spoken and well-intentioned, blissfully illuminating, whole-heartedly humble, an efficacious antidote to our troubled times.

referential entries: Neville’s 20 FEET FROM STARDOM (2013, 6.1/10); Marielle Heller’s A BEAUTIFUL DAY IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD (2019, 7.6/10).