The novelist Martin Amis once told me a story about faltering middle-age memory. He and a group of friends were sitting around the dinner table when one of them started talking about a famous — make that legendary — American film actor. Only no one could remember his name.

Various super-smart 50-ish literati fumbled around in the overstuffed attics of their brains for a name that, embarrassingly, wouldn’t come. You know, that guy who was in “The Godfather.” At which point, a teenager sitting alone on the other side of the room, piped up, “You mean Marlon Brando?”

It’s a safe bet that the long line of worshippers interviewed in “Brando,” a two-part documentary showing tonight and tomorrow on Turner Classic Movies (together with a selection of Brando’s films), will never forget the actor’s name in any circumstances.

“There’s before Brando and after Brando,” says Martin Scorcese, sounding rather as if he were talking about Christ. He goes on to say that young people should go back and watch Brando’s movies because “now they’re too hip to feel these emotions that were exploding on the screen with him. It’s about being human.”

A counterargument to that mini-diatribe against youthful moviegoers would be that the caged-animal persona Brando unleashed in the 1950s, first on Broadway and then on film, has been so thoroughly strip-mined by Hollywood — what were Mr. Scorcese’s own “Taxi Driver” and “Raging Bull” about, if not emotions “exploding on the screen”? — that Brando’s volcanic rage, like his campy leather getup in “The Wild One,” is in danger of hardening into cliché, no matter how brilliantly he embodied it.

Watching a clip from 1951’s “A Streetcar Named Desire,” in which Brando, as Stanley Kowalski, terrorizes two women by hurling a dish against the wall and threatens to do the same to the rest of the kitchen, you see the beginning of something you’ve seen more than enough of since. On the other hand, when Maria Schneider asks him for his name in 1972’s “Last Tango in Paris,” and Brando responds with pained, incoherent sounds dredged up from his solar plexus, you can understand why Pauline Kael went gaga over the film in the New Yorker, even if the film now seems more important for its taboo-shattering depiction of sex than as a work of art you’re desperately eager to revisit.

No director is listed for “Brando,” which is appropriate since it feels like the product of a corporation — Turner Classic Movies. There are way too many talking heads — all filmed before the same dark blue backdrop — and many of them (John Travolta, Quincy Jones, Harry Dean Stanton, Patt Morrison, Edward Norton, to name a handful) could easily have been dropped in the interest of giving the man of the hour more screen time. It’s fascinating to learn that Robert De Niro’s celebrated “Are you talkin’ to me?” mirror scene in “Taxi Driver” had its origins in 1967’s “Reflections in a Golden Eye,” in which Brando also talked to himself in a mirror. But we barely get to absorb the clip of the original monologue for all the blabbing going on.

Much of the superstar chat is painfully generic. To listen to Johnny Depp talk about Brando is pretty much the same as hearing him prattle on about Hunter S. Thompson: All you get is soulful, dewy-eyed reverence, backed up by quixotic couture. The furthest we get from a Hollywood perspective are old film clips of John Gielgud and Laurence Olivier offering their opinions of their American counterpart. This is a film about an outsider in which only insiders get a say.

If Brando was really such a cultural avatar — which he indisputably was — why not bring in some voices from the culture at large? What would Mario Cuomo have to say about Brando? Or how about a novelist like Anita Brookner — that I’d pay to listen to — or Philip Roth or Gore Vidal? And why is the film historian David Thomson so kind to Brando here when he’s so surprisingly waspish in his “Biographical Dictionary of Film”? (“Brando seemed more possessed of power than actually in control of it,” he wrote. “Too often, he impersonated characters he had thought out, rather than discover them in himself.”) “Brando” celebrates the actor’s non-conformity as “the living, breathing epicenter of his art,” but its choice of interviewees and the topics they discuss are drearily predictable.

What the film has going for it is a wealth of old footage — a home movie of the actor clowning around with Montgomery Clift, for example. Contrary to Brando’s reputation as a “mumbler,” interviews with Edward R. Murrow and others show him to have been articulate in a way we associate with British stage actors. There’s also mesmerizing footage of him flirting with a young woman that would qualify as Exhibit A in any documentary titled, “The Art of Seduction.”

Certain biographical details — such as the fact that, as a child he began imitating people to retain the attention of his alcoholic mother, setting in motion a complex love/hate relationship to acting he was never able to resolve — feel convincing rather than trite. His multiple affairs, numerous marriages, his passion for Tahiti, the tragic history of his children, and his notorious descent into corpulence are also dealt with.

There is also Brando the pioneer — as a purveyor of raw male sexual energy; as a superstar blithely unafraid to portray a homosexual, as in “Reflections in a Golden Eye”; as an actor-activist involved in the civil rights movement, with the Black Panthers and (most notoriously) with Native Americans; as an environmentalist long before Hollywood went “green,” and, finally, as a spitefully avaricious demander of inflated paychecks.

The famous bit of dialogue from “The Wild One” (“What are you rebelling against, Johnny?” “Whaddya got?”) gets a predictable airing, but “Brando” doesn’t even allude to Edward Dmytryk’s 1958 adaptation of Irwin Shaw’s World War II novel, “The Young Lions,” in which Brando arguably turned in his most subversive performance by portraying a Nazi officer in daringly sympathetic fashion.

His co-star, Montgomery Clift, a Jewish-American G.I. who kills him at the climax of the film, reportedly accused Brando of turning his character into “a f—ing Nazi pacifist” and stated that Brando had to be forcibly dissuaded from dying with his arms outstretched in a Christ-like pose. The reviewer for the New York Times wrote that Brando’s blond übermensch was designed to evoke “complete sympathy,” and the film was not so much “anti-Nazi as vaguely and loosely anti-war,” revealing “no noticeable moral difference between the one German [Brando] and the two Americans [Dean Martin and Clift].”

Sounds rather contemporary, doesn’t it? In fact, rather than lazily dabbling in moral relativism, I think Brando was intent on portraying a German military officer who was a Nazi in name only, and who realizes too late he has served a despicable ideology.

On the other hand, the British actor James Fox does mention (in another context) that Brando always tried to turn his characters into victims, and here we see the tendency extended even to an officer of the Third Reich. Mr. Fox goes on to say that Brando was instrumental in ushering in our current victim culture — yet another pioneering role — but predictably he’s cut short before he can develop the thought, let alone discuss the ramifications. Brando deserves better than “Brando,” as do we.

bbernhard@nysun.com