Ross McElwee made his name as a creator of personal documentaries with “Sherman’s March,” from 1986, in which two strands of narrative are intertwined: McElwee’s efforts to make a film about the titular Civil War campaign, and his return to his family home in North Carolina, where friends and relatives, concerned that he’s still single in his mid-thirties, try to find him a woman to marry. Still his best-known film—it’s currently playing at Film Forum, in a new restoration—it set the tone and template for his career, in which thematic explorations and personal matters prove inextricably connected. His new film, “Remake” (opening Friday at the same venue), is made on the same principle but with altogether more serious matters at stake. Its starting point is the death of the filmmaker’s son, Adrian, in 2016, at the age of twenty-seven, from a fentanyl overdose. It chronicles the father-son relationship while also showing how extensively that relationship was mediated and shaped by McElwee’s films, by the presence of cameras, by cinema itself.

The title, “Remake,” reflects McElwee’s approach: he returns to his own movies, including ones in which he filmed Adrian, and, by excerpting them, commenting on them in voice-over, and intercutting them with other footage, he revises them in keeping with the agonizing end that he now knows. Three films come in for particular scrutiny: “Sherman’s March,” which was made before Adrian’s birth; “In Paraguay,” filmed in 1995, in which he and his then wife, Marilyn, joined by young Adrian, travel to adopt another child; and “Photographic Memory,” from 2011, in which McElwee extensively films Adrian, a wildly inventive but undisciplined twenty-one-year-old, whose grandiose creative dreams arouse McElwee’s wary skepticism.

Even in a film as sombre as “Remake,” one of the joys of McElwee’s method is the freedom with which he constructs his movies. The premises he begins with shift drastically as unforeseen circumstances arise. He follows his impulses about what’s interesting, what’s relevant, what’s illuminating, and he films his life and his encounters as they occur, with spontaneity and curiosity: he wants to know not just what will happen but what will happen to him, and much of that experience comes through in the personalities and the actions of people he meets in his free-flowing adventures. But, as he states at the start of “Remake,” his family is the center of his films. No set of bonds is more deep-rooted, and the flux of those intimate connections, the fundamental passion energizing even the simplest interaction, imbue these wanderings with elemental power.

“Remake” falls into three broad sections. First, there is Adrian’s cheerful, curious, outgoing childhood, filled with the found poetry of daily life, as when, on one of the many fishing trips that father and son took together, Adrian, then about nine, answers McElwee’s question about why he enjoys them: “I just love the deep surprise of the ocean.” Then comes the adolescent and young-adult Adrian of “Photographic Memory,” in which Adrian, pursuing a scattershot range of projects—filmmaking, graphic design, T-shirts, a novel—turns sullen and contentious. Third, there are Adrian’s twenties, marked by drug and alcohol abuse, stays in rehab, a diagnosis of bipolar disorder, and a series of self-motivated projects that never came to fruition, including a documentary about his struggle with substance abuse. McElwee characterizes those times as “seven years of sporadic hell” which had hitherto remained outside the public eye. In “Remake,” it is copiously, painfully documented with footage shot both by McElwee and by Adrian himself.

The ethical core of “Remake” is McElwee’s own cinematic practice, a subject that has come to the fore in previous films of his, when subjects—particularly family members—take issue with his recording private situations and making them public. In “Remake,” McElwee considers Adrian’s troubles in light of their relationship, both as father and son and as filmmaker and subject. He talks about the casual filmmaking he did with Adrian, done a bit at a time but adding up to a large amount of material. These are essentially home movies, but home movies with a difference, because, unlike those of most families, McElwee’s footage sometimes reaches the public eye (as in the childhood fishing scenes in “Photographic Memory”). The film “In Paraguay,” though filmed in 1995, didn’t première until 2008, at the Venice Film Festival, after which, McElwee says, further screenings were “postponed indefinitely” until he and Marilyn “could negotiate” the public display of family life. (The matter appears not to have been resolved: “In Paraguay” has never been released, and McElwee’s website lists it as “currently out of distribution.”) During the period covered in “Remake,” Marilyn seeks a divorce; the film leaves the impression (confirmed by McElwee in a recent interview) that his filming at home was one of the reasons she did so. The couple agrees to a separation, despite being worried, McElwee says, about its effect on their children. Soon, while McElwee is living alone in an apartment in Boston, Adrian, a college student, is taken to a hospital emergency room after overdosing, and then moves in with his father.

The nature of fatherhood is a recurrent preoccupation in McElwee’s work. In “Photographic Memory,” he contrasts the relationships he and his brother had with their father, a surgeon. McElwee’s brother, having followed their father into the medical profession, received mentorship and experienced the glow of paternal pride, whereas McElwee’s youthful filmmaking vocation was met with bewilderment and doubt. When McElwee finds that Adrian is interested in filmmaking, he hopes to be able to provide the guidance and encouragement that his brother got and he didn’t. But his view of Adrian’s methods, goals, and way of life end up making the bond of mentorship both tenuous and barbed. Adrian, a freestyle skiier, made videos of himself and friends doing difficult and dangerous stunts, and sometimes did so while himself skiing fast and, McElwee asserts, under the influence. Moreover, for all Adrian’s artistic efforts, he doesn’t manage to complete anything, and McElwee’s impatience is as apparent as his concern; he nonetheless tries to help.

When McElwee gets an offer from a movie producer for rights to make a fictional adaptation of “Sherman’s March,” he accepts—in part, in the hope that the Hollywood production will have a job for Adrian and help to launch him in a professional movie career. Yet, at the same time, McElwee is dubious of his son’s ambitions. He believes that a life in the camera eye and on the big and small screen has given Adrian a skewed view of the pleasure and power of fame, and their conversations only reinforce this view. Adrian complains that McElwee, instead of making documentaries, should have followed the lucrative path of a Hollywood director, and even reproaches him for having turned down an offer to make a TV commercial. He says that his father should have tried to make him a child star rather than making his childhood a subject of documentaries.

But Adrian also offers a more incisive criticism. He says that McElwee should be “reversing the roles, sometimes, a little more”—that is, that he should allow Adrian to film him as well as the other way around. Adrian also says bluntly that McElwee should come out more often from behind the camera, and McElwee responds, “People don’t want to see a film about me, they want to see a film about what I see.” Adrian disagrees, and he’s right: some of the best sequences in “Sherman’s March,” for instance, are ones in which McElwee sets a camera and mike on a tripod and, all by himself, films himself speaking directly into them. Such scenes are refreshing breaks from the filmmaker’s explorations of other people and of his connections with them; first, as a mere matter of style, their inherently static and durational format subjects him to a quasi-forensic interrogation of the sort that others, in the roving eye of a handheld camera, don’t receive. Second, most of McElwee’s commentary comes in the form of voice-over narration laid onto the soundtrack in the editing process, after the shooting is done; his onscreen presence, speaking of events as they’re unfolding, puts him at the same level of midstory uncertainty as his subjects, and deprives him of the commanding retrospective authority of the voice-over.

The implications of this discussion about role reversal, brief though it is, reverberate throughout “Remake.” Adrian indeed films McElwee, including in tough times that follow. McElwee is diagnosed with a benign brain tumor and undergoes surgery; during his recovery, at home, with Adrian, he wears a baseball cap with a small video camera attached to it, and Adrian wields a larger camera to film him at the same time. Adrian has a thing about cameras, a theoretical stance that suggests the power of his creative vision: he hates his father’s small handheld video cameras, says they make the filmmaker look like a lame dad, and advocates at least putting them on tripods to give the appearance of serious filmmaking.

After Adrian’s death, McElwee explains, in voice-over, that he stopped considering himself a filmmaker and spent a year watching film footage that Adrian had made, in order, he says, as if to Adrian, to “begin seeing the world through your eyes.” What’s clear is that Adrian had talent. His work is distinctive, often visually exciting, emotionally committed, sometimes searingly confessional, matching his father’s work in unsparing self-revelation, even at times of danger and crisis. The material is wide-ranging. Some of it documents the lives of his own circle, in an effort to represent the experience of his generation; some comes from a film he planned about, as he puts it, “the American drug problem and prescription problem and myself”; and some comes from a fiction film he started to make with his father, in their hotel during a film festival at which “Photographic Memory” was being shown. McElwee serves as his son’s cameraman, while Adrian directs and stars, playing what McElwee calls “a film-festival big shot,” smoking and drinking, dressing flashily, striding pompously onto the hotel deck. In retrospect, McElwee worries that their film-festival tour, together with Adrian’s own onscreen prominence in his father’s movies, “maybe gave him a distorted sense of reality.”

Adrian’s life onscreen doubtless influenced the rest of his existence. (On the other hand, McElwee and Marilyn’s daughter, Mariah, although she also appears in “Remake,” seems to have been unperturbed by being filmed for public consumption.) Perhaps most telling of all, when McElwee remarries, his new wife, Hyun Kim, herself a filmmaker, categorically refuses to let him film her face. She’s willing to speak with him while the camera is rolling and she allows him to show their joint activities, but at their wedding, while she films his face, he is limited to her feet, hands, and shadow, even as he protests in voice-over that he couldn’t reciprocate fully. Frustrated and possibly uncomprehending, McElwee nonetheless acknowledges that Adrian’s onscreen life, viewed posthumously, makes him seem “like a fictional character, someone who never existed except on film.”

The details of Adrian’s decline are appalling and profoundly painful to watch, and McElwee’s own pain is amplified by what comes off—even in the face of his own artistic, professional, and personal resistance—as a grief-stricken self-reproach, a virtual repudiation of the practice of family filmmaking with which he’s closely identified. Putting one’s children onscreen for public attention comes off as no mere metaphorical muddying of waters or crossing of lines but as a plain and simple abuse of power. Although his curious and tender filming, in “Sherman’s March,” of people in his life, some of whom he reconnects with and re-films in “Remake,” remains warmhearted and innocent, his family filming—the transformation of home life into public images and of the bonds of family into quasi-professional and quasi-artistic ones—ends up looking tainted, unwholesome, misguided from the start. McElwee’s intended remake is more radical than that: it’s more like a total rewind, a dream of a life of nothing but outtakes. ♦