The deal Stan Lee made with the twentieth century was simple and audacious: invent the superheroes, let the world handle the rest. From a shared office at Timely Comics in 1939 to his final cameo before his death in 2018, Lee turned the mythology of American power fantasies into one of the most profitable intellectual-property engines in entertainment history. No figure of comparable creative influence has been more publicly beloved and less carefully examined. Stan Lee, David Gelb’s 86-minute documentary for Disney+, takes that contradiction and — knowingly, deliberately — chooses the love over the examination.

That is not, by itself, a failure. Gelb is one of the great documentary craftsmen working today, and his command of archive is on full display here. The film draws on decades of personal recordings, television interviews, convention footage, and home video to build a portrait of a man who genuinely seemed to enjoy being Stan Lee. The archival Stan Lee — charming, fast-talking, self-mythologizing in real time — is the film’s best asset. When the documentary lets him narrate his own story in his own words across half a century of recordings, it earns a kind of intimacy that scripted narration never could. You understand the appeal. You understand why millions of people lined up to cheer his cameos. You understand the machinery of the persona.

What you do not understand, by the end, is the man.

Gelb made his name with Chef’s Table and Jiro Dreams of Sushi — portraits of creative obsessives that found the complexity inside the dedication. Here he is working with Marvel Entertainment’s blessing and Disney‘s distribution, which explains, if not excuses, the documentary’s most significant omission. Jack Kirby is present in the film — you see his name, you see his work — but the credit dispute that has animated the comics industry for decades gets the softest possible handling. Kirby co-created most of what Lee became famous for: Fantastic Four, X-Men, Thor, The Hulk, Black Panther, The Silver Surfer. The question of where Lee’s contributions ended and Kirby’s began is not a footnote. It is the central unresolved question of Marvel’s origin story, and Stan Lee treats it the way a corporate anniversary video treats uncomfortable HR statistics: present, minimized, moved past.

The clay-animation sequences Gelb uses to cover the early years — where archival footage is thin — are the film’s one genuine miscalculation. The tone does not match. The archival Stan Lee is slick and confident; the clay approximation of him is awkward and slightly uncanny. It reads as a gap-filler that didn’t find the right register, which is strange from a director of Gelb’s skill.

What the documentary does well — and it does this consistently — is capture Lee’s function as a performer. He was not merely a creator; he was a one-man marketing department, a huckster in the most affectionate sense of the word, a man who understood that the story of the story mattered as much as the story itself. The documentary follows the arc from pulp comic writer to Marvel’s unofficial spokesman to MCU celebrity to cultural monument, and in that arc it finds genuine warmth. Joan Lee and J.C. Lee provide personal context. Kevin Feige grounds the legacy in what it became commercially. The love in the room is real.

But love is not analysis, and tribute is not biography. Stan Lee is the kind of documentary that works best as a starting point — something you watch before you go read the actual history. It will move you, because Stan Lee’s actual story, even the sanitized version, is genuinely moving. A kid from the Bronx who invented a universe. That is not nothing. The problem is that the universe he invented is larger and stranger and more contested than 86 minutes of approved archive are willing to admit.

For Marvel fans, for comics readers, for anyone who grew up with a superhero cameo as the best part of a blockbuster summer, Stan Lee delivers exactly what it promises. It is polished, warm, and well-made within its constraints. Those constraints, though, are the film’s defining feature — and not in a way Gelb would choose if he had a different client.