In Won’t You Be My Neighbor, the touching and insightful survey of Rogers’ decades-spanning career from Oscar-winning director Morgan Neville (“Twenty Feet From Stardom”), the filmmaker highlights Rogers’ capacity to explore complex themes through the lens of a kid’s program that took a dead-serious approach to his young viewers’ needs.

It’s kind of hard to write about Won’t You Be My Neighbor? as a film. It’s exceptionally well-made, mind you – which shouldn’t be a huge surprise coming from Morgan Neville, who won an Academy Award for directing 20 Feet From Stardom – but beyond being a film, it’s an experience of earnestness we don’t see or hear much anymore, to the point that it’s a bit of a jolt to the system.

Oscar winner Morgan Neville (“20 Feet From Stardom”) carves in stone the case for Rogers’ as an authentic American TV saint.

In his three-decade run, Rogers touched millions of souls. But the film is honest in questioning whether, in the end, he really made a difference.

Fred Rogers is gone and the world is a much scarier place; this film, like a gift, briefly transports us back to the calm we felt long ago.