A five-hour documentary series about director Martin Scorsese runs the obvious risk of being everything a Scorsese movie is not: reverential, indulgent and direly in need of a few extra Rolling Stones songs. But Mr Scorsese’s director, Rebecca Miller, skilfully sidesteps these pitfalls by essentially getting out of the way and letting Scorsese and his films speak for themselves.

The result is a gripping hagiography that doesn’t so much proclaim Scorsese a genius as it lets us bask in his brilliance. Showing rather than telling, Miller delves liberally into the archive of Scorsese’s work, so that the visceral power of his film-making is front and centre.

A clip from 1980’s Raging Bull closes in on the black-and-white blood dripping off the ropes of a boxing ring on to the canvas – a gory effect that Scorsese initially noticed when attending his first boxing bout, with his muse and collaborator Robert De Niro.

Miller also replays the scene in the mobster classic Goodfellas where Scorsese’s own mother portrays the doting mamma of Joe Pesci’s psychotic hoodlum. Catherine Scorsese later told her son that she would not have taken the gig had she known that Pesci’s character had a body stashed in the trunk of his car outside.

Scorsese himself, now 82, is as much a star as his movies. A tightly compressed ball of Catholic angst and film-making flair, in his conversations with Miller, he has the same nitro-glycerine energy that illuminated his cameo in Taxi Driverin which he played an unhinged husband planning to shoot his unfaithful wife (the sequence is not shown, presumably because it contains a racial slur).

He vividly recollects his hard-knock upbringing in Italian New York. The tentacles of the mob were everywhere – after his father had a run-in with the wrong person in Brooklyn, the family was forced to leave their nice home in the suburbs and return to the slums of Lower Manhattan.

Much like his work, Scorsese is a blotted and bloodied open book. He reflects with a degree of dark amusement on the years lost to cocaine addiction. When he was rushed to an emergency room in 1978 with internal bleeding, doctors told him he was hours away from death. “The problem is, you enjoy the sin,” he shrugs. “I enjoyed a lot of it”.

He’s just as forthcoming about his obsession with film. He remembers how, as a 12-year-old, he would sketch movie shots on a copybook. It was the same method he would use when planning his masterful one-shot of the entrance to the Copacabana nightclub in Goodfellas.

Because he was from a working-class background, nothing came easy and he had to hustle for a career. It was a skill that stood him in good stead when evangelical Christians picketed screenings of The Last Temptation of Christ in 1988, amid wildly overblown rumours that it featured footage of Jesus romping, Carry On style, with Mary Magdalene.

He recalls wryly how the backlash got out of hand, to the point where protesters were re-enacting the crucifixion outside the house of the head of Universal Pictures. “Lou Wasserman looked out the window, and there was a man dressed as Jesus being forced on the ground.”

That dogged streak was also invaluable when shooting Gangs of New York in Rome. Scorsese had to cope not only with a spiralling budget and a young and raw Leonardo DiCaprio but also with the boorish machinations of producer Harvey Weinstein, who wanted to dumb down the script at every opportunity. “He was a salesman and a thug,” says Scorsese. “He’s not an artist.”

As befits a figure of Scorsese’s status, A-listers line up to pay homage. Jodie Foster says Scorsese was “just so excited about making movies” on the set of Taxi Driver. However, when the studio threatened to gut the film of its violence, Brian De Palma says Scorsese vowed to “get a gun” (Scorsese says he may have said as much but that he wasn’t in fact planning to shoot anyone).

Mick Jagger is baffled as to why he would use the Stones’s tender ballad Long Long While to soundtrack a sequence in Casino in which Joe Pesci stabs a man in the eye with a pen. Daniel Day-Lewis (Miller’s husband) endearingly refers to Scorsese – “Marty” to everyone else – as “Martin”. Isabella Rossellini, the third of his five wives, says that “Marty was not really interested so much in being married – he wanted to make films”.

The only notable absentee is Tom Cruise, with whom he worked on The Color of Money. Nor is there much in the way of bombshells – though there is a moving scene at the end where Scorsese sits with his wife, Helen Morris, who has advanced Parkinson’s. Ultimately – and unlike Scorsese – Miller isn’t doing anything daring or new here. But this is an engaging portrait of one of the greatest directors of all time – a long-form love-letter that does what every good cinematic tribute should. It makes you want to stop watching and go back to explore the films themselves.

Mr Scorsese is available now on Apple TV

Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more.