It is perhaps best to call Phil Grabsky’s absorbing film “In Search of Mozart,” screened Monday evening as part of the Mostly Mozart Festival, a “life and works,” since it includes excerpts from performances of more than 60 of the composer’s 626 works (as first catalogued by Ludwig von Köchel in 1862). The film, narrated by Juliet Stevenson, also showcases some 42 interviews, mainly with musicologists and performers. With so much musicological opinion sampled, “In Search of Mozart” can’t help but be accurate and well–reasoned. Sensationalism is absent here.

Mr. Grabsky’s approach is chronological, stretching from Mozart’s birth in Salzburg in 1756 to his death in Vienna in 1791, and from the keyboard pieces of K. 1 to the Requiem, K. 626. The first piece we hear, though, is the ethereal slow movement of the Clarinet Concerto, K. 622, perhaps because, as with other slow movements for prominent woodwinds, the music seems so godlike. Mr. Grabsky’s skillful editing never allows us to become so deeply involved in the performances that we’re disappointed with the return of the narrative.

Along with performances and interviews, Mr. Grabsky fills the screen with modern day shots of places Mozart visited in his many travels, plus glimpses of portraits of Mozart and his family — the close-ups of the composer are endlessly fascinating. And Mr. Grabsky copiously draws upon the extensive correspondence between Mozart and his family, occasioned by the many times they lived in different cities. Especially moving is the description by Mozart’s wife Konstanze of his final moments as he struggled to instruct his student Süssmayr on how to finish the Requiem: “His last movement was an attempt to express with his mouth the drum passages.”

What sort of a man was Mozart? Well, one quite different from the foulmouthed, perpetual adolescent of “Amadeus,” the film that created an image of Mozart for the modern-day audience. The scholarly consensus is that he was actually a psychologically normal human being. As is typical of the film’s level-headed approach, not much is made of the scatological content of his letters, which are simply said to be typical of families of the day. But once the subject is broached, off-color references are introduced to amusing effect, as when Mozart writes to Konstanze from Berlin in eloquently romantic terms about how much he misses her, then adds that when he returns he’ll give her a good spanking. The composer was also no isolated artist in the Romantic tradition. He liked the company of aristocrats even if his income inhibited his socializing.

The film also makes an effort to get at what his genius involved, even if no satisfactory explanation is ultimately put forward. Though the performers interviewed sometimes gush a bit, some make striking observations. Soprano Renée Fleming wonders, apropos of the Countess’s arias in “The Marriage of Figaro,” how it could have been possible for a young man to have had such remarkable insights into the fears of a woman. The late Stanley Sadie, editor of the New Grove Dictionary of Music, stresses how Mozart’s travels exposed him to a broad range of experiences that he absorbed into his musical personality. Another musicologist, Cliff Eisen, speaks of the “energy of the man,” calling him a “remarkable firecracker.”

A few choice musical examples, among hundreds of possibilities, help illustrate Mozart’s genius. He disrupts the regularity of the four-bar phrase in an early keyboard work, the Piano Concerto in E flat, K. 271, which, with its surprise entrance of the piano in the second bar, is said to be his first truly great piece. But Louis Langrée, music director of Mostly Mozart, notes that the composer never made innovations to “such an extreme extent that he loses contact with the audience.”

Only a few details of the film, such as the fact that many musical examples are in the minor keys, as if that automatically confers upon a piece a degree of profundity, prove questionable. One can also regret that virtually nothing is said about his last, great opera seria, “La Clemenza di Tito.”

Unfortunately, chances of seeing “In Search of Mozart,” which has been released theatrically in Australia, are currently few in this country. In a short interview after the screening, Mr. Grabsky said an American distributor has been appointed and that a DVD release is targeted for May. He added that in editing the film, which runs 128 minutes, he also produced a 10-hour version. I wouldn’t mind seeing it.

Mostly Mozart Festival continues through August 26 (Lincoln Center, 212-721-6500).