Questlove, on the screen, talks about his disbelief, the previous year, when Rolling Stone made a list of the 100 greatest guitar players of all time, and Prince was left off it. Prince nursed these kinds of slights, and his commandeering of the stage — at an event associated with Jann Wenner and Rolling Stone — was, in part, an act of revenge. There’s spite and aggression in the performance. But there’s also pain — in his wincing face, his apartness: a small, soigné Black man onstage with these rumpled white rockers.

Edelman juxtaposes the first moments of the solo with wisps of the past, calling back to earlier images: Here’s Prince jumping up again to be seen behind his peers; here’s Prince as a baby being held by his mother, and we hear his voice saying, “I ran away when I was 12.” We know, from the sequence before this one, that his parents had recently died. Suddenly, this triumphant performance is given this other dimension of insecurity and insistence in the face of all doubters — the white rock establishment, his uncomprehending parents, the demons in his head. The keening he elicits from the guitar is so plaintive, you want to weep too. A close friend of his later told me that Prince would watch this performance over and over.

Prince died on April 21, 2016, at age 57, of a fentanyl overdose, alone, in an elevator at Paisley Park. His death was presaged in the lyrics of “Let’s Go Crazy” (“Tell me,” he yowls, “are we gonna let de-elevator bring us down? Oh no, let’s go! Let’s go crazy! Let’s go nuts!”), leaving his friends to wonder if he had somehow planned it, fulfilling his own prophecy, orchestrating his mythology until the end. In the final moments of the film, Edelman gives him to us in his glory, sitting at a piano and singing “The Ladder,” a song but also a prayer: “Everybody’s looking for the ladder. Everybody wants salvation of the soul.”

When the screening ended, after midnight, Questlove was shaken. Since he was 7 years old, he said, he had modeled himself on Prince — his fashion, his overflowing creativity, his musical rule-breaking. So “it was a heavy pill to swallow when someone that you put on a pedestal is normal.” That was the bottom line for him: that Prince was both extraordinary and a regular human being who struggled with self-destructiveness and rage. “Everything’s here: He’s a genius, he’s majestical, he’s sexual, he’s flawed, he’s trash, he’s divine, he’s all those things. And, man. Wow.”

I called Questlove a few months later, to see how it had all settled in his mind. He said he went home that night and spoke to his therapist until 3 a.m. He cried so hard he couldn’t see. Watching the film forced him to confront the consequences of putting on a mask of invincibility — a burden that he feels has been imposed on Black people for generations. “A certain level of shield — we could call it masculinity, or coolness: the idea of cool, the mere ideal of cool was invented by Black people to protect themselves in this country,” he said. “But we made it sexy. … We can take dark emotion and make that cool, too. ”The night of the screening, he said he told his therapist, was a wake-up call: “I don’t want my life to be what I just saw there.” It was painful, he said, to “take your hero and subject him to the one thing that he detests more than life, which is to show his heart, show his emotion.” But Questlove feels the film performs a cultural service: a cracking, particularly for Black men, of a facade of invincibility. “No one wants to go first,” he told me, but “for the greater good, for the greater good of mankind and our evolution as human beings, and wanting to be seen as human beings,” he said, “I saw this as a rare, rare, rare chance for us to look human to the world.”

A few weeks after the Brooklyn screening, a cut of the full film was shown to the estate for a factual review. McMillan responded with 17 pages of notes demanding changes. Edelman, wanting to reach a compromise, made some adjustments. But he was adamant that he wouldn’t remove episodes or ideas that felt crucial for the film’s narrative and journalistic cohesion. The estate had demanded, for instance, that he reshoot Paisley Park because they didn’t like the way it looked, or that during the scene depicting Prince’s death, he remove the song “Let’s Go Crazy,” with its lyric about the elevator. They wanted him to take out a part of Wendy Melvoin’s interview, when she talks about Prince’s calling her up after he became more religious to ask her to renounce her homosexuality as a precondition for getting the band back together, and to excise Alan Leeds’ assessment — which was echoed by some critics at the time — that Prince’s 2001 album, “The Rainbow Children,” contained antisemitic lyrics. Edelman refused, insisting that this phase of Prince’s life demanded explanation. How could an artist who talked about freedom and inclusiveness also profess these kinds of beliefs? It wasn’t the entirety of Prince, but it was an important part of his trajectory.