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A moving, interesting documentary on a man who by all accounts was the genuine article, "Mister Rogers and Me" is more than a film about a guy with a bad case of hero worship. It's a film about a man who was genuinely, through and through good.
The film's title is a bit of a misnomer. Yes, the film's hook involves filmmaker Benjamin Wagner's accidental brush with legendary child-show host Fred Rogers (becoming, over the course of a weekend, literally Mr. Rogers' neighbor), but soon the film becomes about Mister Rogers himself.
There are interviews with people who knew him, and we're not just talking his friends and children, or people who would aggrandize him and perpetuate the myth. There are people like Susan Stamberg of NPR, the late Tim Russert of NBC's Meet the Press, and others, who confirm, as Wagner found, that Mr. Rogers wasn't a TV personality who turned into a regular cynical crabapple when the cameras stopped rolling. No, his schtick, it turns out, was no schtick at all. He was the real deal.
There are accounts from several sources of him stopping at barbecues and get-togethers and counseling children, answering correspondences and being a trusted friend. Wagner himself shares letters he got from a man whom he met once on vacation, and he offered the same sage advice and comforting shoulder in the real world that he did on television.
Wagner allows the film to meander awhile, and that might sound like a bad thing, but in this case its more akin to hanging out in Mr. Rogers' real house, hearing stories and anecdotes from his life, and taking a wonderful trip down nostalgia avenue, and once more getting to see that old neighbor as he really was: just like you remember him.
It's a wonderful, moving, truly inspiring portrait of a man we should all aspire to be a little more like.