For pop-culture children of the 1970s, the actor Charles Nelson Reilly, who passed away in May at 76, had an off-kilter iconic stature. Whether nyuck-nyucking through gritted teeth at his own double entendres on TV’s “Match Game” or flailing like an effete Don Knotts alongside Hope Lange and Edward Mulhare on the small-screen version of “The Ghost and Mrs. Muir,” Reilly’s comic persona rang with a peculiar honesty. There was something very real and somehow strong lurking beneath the affected overbite, big glasses, limp wrists, and ridiculous toupee.

“The Life of Reilly,” a new documentary making its premiere today at Cinema Village, spotlights the formative endurance, the sensitive intelligence, and the trouper’s resolve behind Reilly’s act. Directed by Barry Poltermann and Frank Anderson, the film is culled from the final performances of the actor’s one-man show, “Save It for the Stage: The Life of Reilly,” before a long illness and pneumonia claimed his life.

Tall and gaunt, by turns scathing and gentle, Reilly holds court for almost 90 minutes on a darkened stage furnished for a theatrical rehearsal. Though at times painfully eloquent about the ironies that life has offered him, Reilly appears for the most part to be continually astonished by the facts and feelings surrounding his rise from a star-crossed childhood in the Bronx, to a star-studded education under Uta Hagen at New York’s fledgling HB Studio in the 1950s, and finally to Broadway accolades and television ubiquity.

“You think it’s all going to be game shows?” he shouts, repeating a particularly cutting and clinical regret with which his Swedish émigré mother used to torment her only son. In fact, “The Life of Reilly” largely ignores the actor’s years as a campy TV panelist, preferring to dwell on his stage successes (he is a multiple Tony Award nominee and a winner for 1962’s “How To Succeed in Business Without Really Trying”) and the singular accomplishment of surviving a childhood that he likens to an Ingmar Bergman drama in real life.

Born in 1931, Reilly came of age in a household ruled by his racist, xenophobic mother. Reilly’s father, a “small gentleman” whose artistic talent drew the admiration of Walt Disney, turned to the bottle when Disney’s job offer was vetoed by Signe and the Times Square movie billboards that were his stock-in-trade began to feature photographs instead of his custom-painted creations.

After his father suffered a nervous breakdown, Reilly and his family moved into a two-room apartment in Hartford, Conn., already occupied by Signe’s non-English-speaking parents and by Reilly’s aunt, a former nurse whose “hair smelled like honeysuckle and Lucky Strike cigarettes,” and who had been rendered catatonic by an experimental lobotomy. Not surprisingly, young Charles was increasingly inclined toward escapist flights of imagination and, eventually, after-school theatricals.

Life outside the Reilly home came with its own perils. Reilly breathlessly describes attending a July 6, 1944, matinée performance of the Ringling Bros. circus that climaxed in the infamous Hartford Circus tent fire and the deaths of more than 100 people. Though he essays the loss of life and appalling negligence behind it with equal horror, it’s his annoyed mother’s prescient invective — “I hope it burns to the ground!” — that appears to be the heaviest burden the actor carried from the experience at the tender age of 13. But the Hartford Circus conflagration didn’t keep Reilly from the limelight. “The Life of Reilly” hits its stride as the actor recounts training with Hagen alongside such future luminaries as Steve McQueen, Geraldine Page, and Jason Robards. “We had three things in common,” he recalls, eyes alight with the rekindled ambitions of youth. “We wanted to go onstage, we didn’t have any money, and all of us couldn’t act for s—!”

But Hagen’s conservatory attention and the real-world lessons of a workaday acting world that saw Reilly perform, by his accounting, in 22 off-Broadway shows in a single year, proved to be artistically galvanizing as well as personally motivating. As one watches him recount his story, Reilly, though well into his 70s and having suffered more than his share of hard knocks (he failed his first small-screen audition when an NBC executive declared, “They don’t let queers on television”), gracefully inhabits the rare zone in which self-absorption is tempered by self-renewing dedication to one’s craft.

Despite its star’s litany of family outrages and propensity for gooey, gratifying professional nostalgia, there are neither devils nor angels in “The Life of Reilly.” In the end, the film is a breezy tale of one man’s life, recalled not as a checkerboard of triumphs and tragedies, but as an embarrassment of personal riches bestowed by an ultimately loving, if epically flawed, family, and by the other real-life characters who opened their hearts to Reilly along the way.