Syd Barrett in Have You Got It Yet? The Story of Syd Barrett and Pink Floyd (Aubrey Powell/Abramorama)

Syd Barrett’s shadow has loomed large over Pink Floyd for more than a half century. Barrett was only in the band a short time, just long enough to record and release an album and several singles as well as gain a reputation as part of one of the first rock acts to present dazzling multimedia performances. His colorful personality and later mental illness have informed some of the British group’s best (and most popular) works, including the albums The Dark Side of the Moon and The Wall.

In Roddy Bogawa and Storm Thorgerson’s enlightening documentary about Barrett’s life, death, and continuing legacy, the legend of Barrett as the mad genius is explored, but is also put into context. Barrett, who was born in Cambridge, had an artistic bent from an early age, and wanted to become a painter. His real name was Roger, but the nickname he was given, Syd, stuck.

Soon after arriving in London to attend art school in 1964, he met bassist Roger Waters, Richard Wright, and Nick Mason and formed Pink Floyd. The handsome, intelligent, and magnetic Barrett’s exuberant and psychedelic songwriting was filled with an English sort of whimsy, as in the early gems “Arnold Layne,” “See Emily Play,” and “Bike.” He was also an innovative guitar player who was among the earliest to use feedback in his music.

However, LSD and other psychedelic drugs, along with an ambivalence about being a rock star, started taking their toll on Barrett’s psyche. The group brought on board guitarist and singer David Gilmour to supplement Barrett for live performances. One day, Mason recounts, as they were driving to a local gig, they were on their way to pick up Barrett when someone (Mason doesn’t remember who) asked if they should bother. They did not stop at Barrett’s place and played the show without him. It was early 1968, and he never performed as a member of Pink Floyd again.

That is when the Barrett legend began, and it’s to the directors’ credit that they never lose sight of Barrett as a person, a troubled soul, a friend, a colleague, a lover, and a brother. Among those who discuss Barrett are his sister Rosemary; several former girlfriends, including his fiancée, Gala Pinion; music and art colleagues, including the film’s co-director Thorgerson and his Hipgnosis album art designer cohort Aubrey Powell; and several younger musical admirers. Even trained psychological experts explain the vagaries of mental illness and how drugs like LSD can warp one’s mind.

Several of these talking heads are insightful, touching, and also funny. When Pinion mentions that she was becoming worried about Barrett’s disintegrating mental health, she smiles as she remembers that he had a cat he named, ridiculously, Rover. No less than playwright Tom Stoppard appears toward the end to describe the arc of Barrett’s sad story: “There was a tragedy being played out—tragic tales resonate more acutely than tales of triumph.”

There’s a seminal Pink Floyd story that would be thought of as apocryphal if it hadn’t been corroborated by so many people. When the band was in the studio in June 1975, recording the album Wish You Were Here, everyone gradually noticed a heavyset man, bald and with shaved eyebrows, who had wandered in and sat down. It was Barrett. He didn’t seem to understand that the song they played for him that day, “Shine on You Crazy Diamond,” was dedicated to him.

Soon after that unsettling encounter, Barrett walked the 15 miles from London back to his childhood home in Cambridge, which he never left again. Rosemary took care of him until his death in 2006, at age 60, of pancreatic cancer and complications from diabetes. Gilmour notes regretfully that he never took the time to visit Barrett in the decades that passed after that day in the recording studio. He ruefully states that, if he had gone to see him, “both Syd and I could have gained something.”

The film’s resonant title comes from a strange Barrett song that Mason remembers Pink Floyd working on in a recording session to no avail, since Barrett kept arbitrarily changing the arrangement. (In the song, a chorus answers the title question “Have You Got It Yet?” with an insistent “No—no—no!”) The breakdown of that session perfectly encapsulates Syd Barrett’s seemingly unstoppable mental decline, which Bogawa and Thorgerson explore tactfully, thoughtfully, and sympathetically.