It is perhaps hard to remember now what it felt like to see Superman come alive on the big screen for the first time. But whether you did it when Superman was first released in 1978, or over the years when men in leotards and masks were not yet an annual ritual, you never forgot Christopher Reeve.

There was something in that combination of gentleness and non-threatening masculinity, the kind eyes and the shy smile, the high cheekbones and the curl of hair resting just so on the forehead, that made Reeve both a superman who could have descended from space or just an exceptionally handsome man who lived next door.

That Reeve’s story panned out the way it did further solidified his image as the Man of Steel, as the actor paralysed from the neck down at the age of just 42 chose to live out his remaining years advocating for the cause of the disabled. This documentary on the man that was Superman understands this juxtaposition very well, bringing to jarring attention the world’s caginess around the disabled – our vision clouded by discomfort to pity to guilt, never letting us see or treat them as just human.

In fact, as Reeve movingly recounts, in the days following the fall from a horse that left him paralysed, as he kept thinking about all that had been and all that stretched ahead for him, he told his wife Dana: “Perhaps, it’s time we let me go.” She holds him tight and tells him it is his choice to make, but that they all still love him: “You are still you.”

Those four words start Reeve’s slow road back to somewhat recovery – which includes relearning everything, from bowel and bladder movement to speech therapy, to loss of touch. Directors and co-writers Ian Bonhôte and Peter Ettedgui intercut between Reeve’s early life growing up, his theatre period, his superstardom, his flings, his true love Dana and his children, to give us a full profile of the man.

It is a largely rosy picture, including long stretches where Reeve’s three children Matthew, Alexandra and Will talk about their dad, but it is also a documentary that tells us about a layer of Hollywood that we rarely see.

In the relationships that sustain Reeve – as he says, he increasingly grew to value their worth after his accident – there is his long friendship with Robin Williams, while others such as Susan Sarandon, Glenn Close, Whoopi Goldberg and Jeff Daniels drop in to talk about him. It’s hard to reconcile now that Reeves, who would forever and ever be Superman, trained at Juilliard, started his acting career with Broadway, and was looked at with disdain by his close circle, particularly his strict poet-scholar father, when he chose to go down the path of Hollywood. The fact that Williams, a roommate at Juilliard, followed him down that road made the journey certainly easier, and the documentary fleshes out the special bond they shared, which only grew after the accident.

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Close says at one point: “I believe that had Reeve been alive, Robin (who committed suicide in 2014) would have been too. I truly believe that.”

While the documentary is clearly devoted to Reeve and his hero’s arc, it is as generous to people such as Williams and his wife Dana, who leaps off the screen as a ray of sunshine and warmth. Their foundation working for the disabled is now called the Christopher and Dana Reeve Foundation – and for good reason.

Reeve says that the biggest transition the accident brought about in his life, earlier full of constant activity, was the change from being “participant to observer”.

The Christopher Reeve Story manages largely to be both.

Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story directors: Ian Bonhôte, Peter Ettedgui Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story cast: Christopher Reeve, Dana Reeve, Matthew Reeve, Alexandra Reeve Givens, Will Reeve Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story: 3.5 stars