Toni Morrison (Timothy Greenfield-Sanders/Magnolia Pictures)

The subject of two previous documentaries (2018’s The Foreigner’s Home and the BBC’s 2016 Toni Morrison Remembers), the Nobel Prize–winning author of Beloved and Song of Solomon once again takes center stage in the moving and insightful Toni Morrison: The Pieces of I Am.

Directed by photographer and longtime Morrison friend Timothy Greenfield-Sanders (The Black List, The Trans List), this is no straightforward, chronological biopic but rather an impressionistic portrait that explores the events and influences that shaped Morrison’s career as a writer. Drawing the title from a line in Beloved (“She is a friend of my mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order”), the movie aims to capture a sense of Morrison’s work, described by Greenfield-Sanders (in the production notes) as “non-linear in a sense, but very structured at the same time.”

Noted artist Mickalene Thomas’s collage-like opening credits set the tone with overlapping images of Morrison at different stages of her life, from her student days at Howard University to her successful career as a book editor in New York and her current august literary status. Accompanied by Kathryn Bostic’s striking score that mixes jazz, Americana, and blues, the film elegantly blends interviews with Morrison and commentary by cultural critics, fellow writers, and friends, including Angela Davis, Fran Lebowitz, Oprah Winfrey, Hilton Als, Walter Mosley, Sonia Sanchez, Robert Gottlieb, Farah Griffin, and Russell Banks. Evocative artworks by such artists as Romare Bearden, Kara Walker, and Kerry James Marshall add emotional resonance to the narrative, especially in the section recounting the migration of Morrison’s grandparents from the Jim Crow South.

Born Chloe Wolford (she took the name Toni from Anthony, her saint’s name) in Lorain, Ohio, Morrison learned about the impact of language at an early age. Her grandfather boasted to her that he had read the Bible five times, a “revolutionary act” at a time when it was illegal for blacks in the South to learn to read. And when she and her sister started scrawling on the sidewalk a four-letter word they had seen around in their neighborhood, their mother’s horrified reaction taught her that “words have power.”

Having grown up in an integrated community, Morrison was shocked at the segregation she found not only in Washington, DC, but on the campus of Howard University, where lighter-skinned sorority members separated themselves from their darker sisters. Still, she found a new freedom. “When I got to Howard, I was wild,” says Morrison slyly. A brief marriage left her the divorced mother of two sons.

When Morrison began to write, she rejected the idea that in fiction black people’s lives had “no meaning apart from the white gaze.” Referring to Ralph Ellison’s classic Invisible Man, she asks, “Invisible to whom?” With her first novel, The Bluest Eye (1970), Morrison wanted “to write a book about a black girl at the center. How does a child develop self-loathing?” Critical appreciation was slow in coming. Early reviewers, mostly male and white, praised the quality of the writing in Sula (1973), but they criticized her focus on black life as narrow and parochial. After Morrison’s most famous novel, Beloved (1987), failed to win the National Book Award, a group of 48 African American writers and critics wrote a letter of protest that was published in The New York Times Book Review.

The documentary also reveals how Morrison broke new ground as a Random House editor by bringing more black writers into a mostly white publishing world; her author list included Toni Cade Bambara, Gayl Jones, Muhammad Ali, and Angela Davis, who praised Morrison for helping “me access my imagination in ways that I continue to be grateful.”

If there is a minor flaw to this loving celebration of a great American author, it is the omission of certain biographical details. There is no mention of the devastating 1993 fire that destroyed her Hudson River home a few weeks after she received the Nobel Prize. Nor is the 2010 death of Morrison’s younger son Slade at age 45 addressed. But given Morrison’s penchant for privacy, this gap is understandable.

Following a theatrical release, the film will air this fall on PBS as part of its American Masters series.