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Let’s start with this: The Chairman of the Board is and always will be a monument of cool, a distant icon who will live forever on another plateau of celebrity, one that is untouchable and could never be reached today.

Such hyperbole comes easily when talking about Frank Sinatra. The man who would have turned 100 years old this year left what has to be one of the most impeccable musical legacies in history. He is adored by the older generation and is still surrounded by a shroud of intriguing mysticism to the younger.

It’s only right that the most famous thing written about Ol’ Blue Eyes was an article by a writer who couldn’t speak to him. Gay Talese’s “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold” has no direct quotes from the then-aging legend; it simply paints a picture from afar. That’s how America knows Sinatra: as a series of myths and stories and pieces of gossip.

Thankfully, Alex Gibney is here to set the record somewhat straight. The director followed up the success of his documentary Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief, which premiered on HBO last week, with Sinatra: All or Nothing at All, a four-hour, two-part look at the singer, which premiered on HBO on Sunday and Monday nights.

Gibney has a big story to tell here, choosing to cover the first 60 years of Sinatra’s life. The film centers on Sinatra’s retirement concert, held in Los Angeles in 1971, in which he played 11 songs he thought best covered his life and career. Gibney uses these 11 songs to break Sinatra’s career into chapters.

The formatting choice is clever, but the sheer amount of material Gibney tries to cover in the four hours is almost too much to handle. A veteran filmmaker at this point, Gibney is a good navigator through Sinatra’s crazy life; he just tries to stop at too many places.

I guess you could blame Sinatra for living with such restlessness and drama. The film begins with his childhood in Hoboken, New Jersey, and takes us to Hollywood, where he won an Oscar for his often-overlooked acting chops. It takes us to Vegas, where he ran wild with the Rat Pack, and to Palm Springs, California, where he spent time with Mia Farrow, his third of four wives. It takes us to an NAACP benefit concert at which Sinatra showed up late, went on without any practice and sang a rendition of “Ol’ Man River” that reportedly made Martin Luther King Jr. cry. It takes us to Washington, where Sinatra helped John F. Kennedy get elected and introduced him to a woman named Judith Campbell Exner along the way. 

It takes us through times in the proud Italian-American’s life when the world jerked him around and others when he held it on a string.

What makes All or Nothing at All great is the pure quality of life this man lived. What makes it an inescapable disappointment is the attempt to bottle it up.

The entire film is made up of old video clips and pictures with voiceover commentary coming from many people close to Sinatra, including his two children and his first wife, Nancy. But none of these people ever appears on camera. Only Sinatra himself, shown in old interviews, breaks up the slideshow and clips.

While Part 1 moves through its two hours at a leisurely pace, Part 2 tries to pack in everything at once. Sinatra in the ’60s and early ’70s had to grapple with the ever-changing times. His old-school, deep-seated cool did not match the wild, carefree nature of the new era. He didn’t like rock ‘n’ roll and never understood the anti-war effort. It was an interesting time in the singer’s life — one of the few challenging periods he faced — but Gibney races through it. The film ends with a semi-emotional climax that seems wildly out of place and does its best to leave a bad taste in the viewer’s mouth.

But it’s hard to take down more than three hours of quality content with a sloppy five-minute crescendo. Sinatra: All or Nothing at All is a worthy watch for those seeking to learn more about Hoboken’s very own national treasure, the once and future Chairman of the Board.