Director Freida Lee Mock’s “Wrestling With Angels: Playwright Tony Kushner,” a feature-length documentary portrait of the Tony Award and Pulitzer Prize winner, makes its premiere tonight as part of PBS’s venerable nonfiction omnibus “POV.” Ms. Mock’s film follows Mr. Kushner from the fateful autumn of 2001, when he premiered his Afghanistan-set play “Homebody/Kabul,” mere weeks after the attacks of September 11, through the presidential election of 2004, in which Mr. Kushner participated as a poll monitor in Florida.

In “Wrestling With Angels,” Mr. Kushner comes across as a man of deeply held personal conviction who has emerged as a highly visible face and mainstream voice on behalf of gay rights and a variety of left-wing causes. The film makes substantial use of Mr. Kushner’s popularity as a speaker and his abundant charisma and winning way with words at the dais. Facing an outgoing senior class at Vassar on graduation day, Mr. Kushner observes that the students he has been invited to address are entering the real world “just in time to be trampled by the four horsemen of the apocalypse.” Speaking at a corporate sponsored Gay Pride Day gathering, he works the crowd like an accomplished vaudevillian and improvises a sight gag using his speaking platform as a prop. At a Lake Charles, La., gathering to celebrate his father’s 80th birthday, Mr. Kushner follows a touching and humorous piece of verse composed for the occasion with a reminder to assembled friends and family to vote for John Kerry in the upcoming election, and takes great amusement in the laughter and good-natured boos his shameless stumping receives.

Tonight’s presentation of “Wrestling With Angels,” which airs at 9 p.m., will mark the close of the 20th season of “POV.” It’s ironic, then, that Ms. Mock’s film lacks a particularly strong narrative point of view of its own. Mr. Kushner is indeed charming. But as presented in “Wrestling With Angels,” his days and nights of writing, rehearsing, and lending himself to causes come across as a kind of privileged “Groundhog Day” treadmill of the same cab rides, cheek kisses, staged readings, rehearsals, and engaged audiences of attractive committed people hanging on his every well-chosen word. Despite the title, and in spite of Mr. Kushner’s disclosures regarding his family’s reticence to accept his homosexuality, and other trials along the way, he doesn’t seem to be wrestling with much of anything except getting to the next meeting.

In one scene, Mr. Kushner eloquently holds forth about the disparity in lifestyle comforts between the third world and America, only to subsequently give a tour of the lovely upstate home his success has earned him. On a panel with the playwrights Larry Kramer, Paul Rudnick, and Terrence McNally, Mr. Kramer declares the theater so neutered and the incoming generation of Americans so inured to conscience politics that he despairs of ever again writing drama. Mr. Kushner nimbly sidesteps the issue of which side of the mainstream fence he has landed on, and his own popularity among the “ghost generation” that Mr. Kramer cites.

Indeed, potential story-forming ironies abound in Ms. Mock’s film. But instead of answering the questions that her film asks in order to get under the skin of an artist as complex as his times, Ms. Mock prefers to stand in the narrative middle ground and rely on a bizarre series of chapter titles so pretentious that they border on parody for structure.

The director Paul Thomas Anderson once observed that though he intends for his artistic voice to sing “Melancholy Baby,” the result tends “to come out like ‘The Star Spangled Banner’ half the time.” The same might be said of Mr. Kushner, whose “Angels in America” courted the apocalyptic, the personal, and the musical with a degree of ardor similar to that in Mr. Anderson’s film “Magnolia.” Mr. Kushner’s plays don’t just embrace theatricality; they grab it and lovingly smother it in a bear hug. Perhaps “Wrestling With Angels” would be a more memorable accounting of Mr. Kushner’s life if it took a page from his work and let conflict and passion tell the story.