In the history of the profession, there have been very few curators who either could merit a biography or who would be interesting and widely known enough to be accorded one. Henry Geldzahler (1935-94), a star curator and cultural impresario, had both the intellectual heft and the Rolodex to merit the full treatment: He lived a life worth examining.

Indeed, Geldzahler’s was a life defined by firsts. He was the first curator of the Department of 20th-Century Art at the Metropolitan Museum, the first director of visual arts for the National Endowment of the Arts, and the first full-time commissioner of cultural affairs for New York City. He did these things at a time that accorded him a central role in the transition from the art scene to the art world, and ultimately to the art industry of today.

Upon seeing the press material for “Who Gets To Call It Art?” – a feature-length documentary that purports to be “a wild ride through the 1960s New York art scene” as well as “a lively portrait of iconoclastic connoisseur Henry Geldzahler” – I thought perhaps we would be treated to a full biographical examination of this singular figure’s life. Yet the film, though consistently entertaining, is both less and more than a documentary biopic, and thus it is at times infuriating.

Early on, the painter Barnett Newman says, “Aesthetics is for me what ornithology must be for the birds.” The statement exemplifies the film’s virtues and its failings. It’s a wonderful apothegm, yet it has nothing to do with Geldzahler – an aesthete who rarely, if ever, spouted aesthetics – and it has nothing to do with the art world of the 1960s. It is to this film what aesthetics are to the average robin.

In other words, there is an abundance of engaging material here, but it has been put together in mystifying ways. The problem, I believe, is that the director, Peter Rosen, was unclear who his audience would be. Those who already know something about Geldzahler – art people who also know something about the art worlds of the 1950s, ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s – will not learn much about the curator or his era.Those who know nothing about Geldzahler will come away with a woefully incomplete picture of the man and his times. (And you have to wonder why they would come to this film in the first place.)

Part of the reason is the title, which is utterly misleading, not to mention clunky. This is a film about passion and history rather than power: It will tell you little about who gets to call art “art,” or why. Then again, it might lure in some unsuspecting viewers.And that wouldn’t be a bad thing, for the film does provide some useful snippets of art history and, if not a full portrait of Geldzahler, then a portrait in profile.

Born in Antwerp, Belgium, to a prosperous Jewish diamond-dealing family, Geldzahler came to the United States in early 1940, six weeks ahead of the German invasion. He studied at Yale and then at Harvard before joining the staff of the Met as an assistant curator. But it was in artists’ studios that he learned to think about art from the inside, as it were. “He lived with us,” Frank Stella says in the film.

He was lucky enough to become friends with many artists: Mr. Stella, Andy Warhol, David Hockney, James Rosenquist, Claes Oldenburg, Jasper Johns, and Robert Rauschenberg in the early 1960s; Francesco Clemente, Keith Haring, and Jean-Michel Basquiat in the 1980s. When asked why the phone in his office at the museum was always ringing, Geldzahler says, “Because all my artists are alive.” Later he opines, “The history of art isn’t about decades but about individuals.” One of the film’s chief pleasures is listening to many of these individuals talk about Geldzahler and what his friendship meant to them.

With his beard and bow tie and ever-present cigar, the curator developed a persona as flamboyant as those of his artist friends. (“Henry never had any trouble coming out of the closet,” the dealer Ivan Karp explains.) He participated in Happenings and hung out at Warhol’s Factory, and yet he wasn’t a fanatic of the new. Rather he was a connoisseur, a lover of beautiful objects.

It was with a connoisseur’s eye that he put together his landmark show “New York Painting and Sculpture: 1940-1970,” which – shocking even today – filled some 35 galleries at the Met with more than 400 works of what was then contemporary art. His only criterion, he says, was that the pieces had “great beauty” and “great ambition.”

On the show, which opened in 1969, and the varying reactions to it, the film is uncharacteristically thorough. On too much else, it is silent. How and of what did Geldzahler die? Why did his relationship with Warhol sputter? In what ways did he change the role of the curator? Such questions are left dangling like pieces of yarn in an unfinished scarf.

Toward the end, Mr. Hockney remarks on how Geldzahler was still curating, still rearranging the objects in his house, up until his death. But, he laments, the arrangements will not last, only the objects. “Who Gets To Call It Art?” certainly brings together much consistently fascinating material – great archival footage, great interviews. If only more attention was paid to how it was arranged.

Until February 14 at Film Forum (209 W. Houston Street, 212-727-8110).