HBO

Barack Obama's 2008 run for president is explored in the HBO documentary "By the People: The Election of Barack Obama."

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(Updated to add show information.)

How you react to "By the People: The Election of Barack Obama," a documentary premiering Tuesday night at 9 on HBO, will be largely a matter of how you feel about Obama himself, his election and his presidency. (Birthers, come not here.) That the film is partial to its subject - not just Obama but the army of campaign workers and supporters who put him in the White House - is clear before you watch it: Taking a cue from the campaign's playbook, HBO's Web site asks viewers to "spread the word" and "promote this film from your blog or Facebook page." A "special kit with all the tools" is offered via download.

Filmmakers Amy Rice and Alicia Sams began following Obama a year before he became a presidential candidate, when he was just a newish senator from Illinois who had made a celebrated speech at the 2004 Democratic Convention and seemed worth watching. They got lucky - with each victory, their story got bigger, their movie more epochal. This could have been a film about the first serious black contender for his party's nomination, or a film about the Democrats' first black nominee, or, as it turned out, the country's first black president. It would have been worth watching in any case.

The film unrolls in the thick of things, without the benefit of retrospective comment or perspective, a series of ups and downs, reverses and advances that reminds you what a long trip it was. Indeed, with its successive climaxes - it is like a three-act play in which every act is the third act - the film does seem to want to end sooner than it does.

If there is a lesson to the film, it's that when running for president, one should not get too worked up over what people say on television, because, although it is a professional necessity to project certitude, no talking head really knows what it's talking about. As we are reminded here, Obama's candidacy was an impossible dream - until it wasn't.

We're so used to seeing the world through the filter of "the news" that we forget that the news is not the world but only the world refracted, packaged and spun. There are filters here, too - what the filmmakers have decided to show, what they were allowed to see. Their unusual access to the campaign is a selling point. Rice and Sams shadow the candidate, hang at his shoulder, sit with him behind the barricades, and it is interesting to see Obama from these less formal angles. But he doesn't exactly unbutton.

Nevertheless, "By the People" has an element of reality missing from most TV news - and, paradoxically, what it has is art. Here we find texture and atmosphere where most TV news is flat and remote. This is less a story of strategy than of energy: What is said is less interesting than how it's said. The twitching leg of campaign strategist David Axelrod, communications director Robert Gibbs working with his son on his lap or his shoulders, the postgraduate slouch of speechwriter Jon Favreau (not, as he must be tired of pointing out, the actor of the same name) convey their own sorts of valuable information.

There is an eye for detail and the well-framed shot, a feel for the light of an Iowa winter, the cushioned hush of a hotel. When historians of the post-post-apocalyptic future look back, films such as this will tell them more about how we have lived than will a thousand hours of CNN.