Mapplethorpe: Look at the Pictures 9 p.m., HBO

This new documentary takes a close-up look at Robert Mapplethorpe’s controversial photographs, with lots of lingering shots of them in all their phallic, S&M, silvery glory. The film also looks at the life of the late artist, who was portrayed in Patti Smith’s lovely memoir “Just Kids.’’ The subtitle, by the way, comes from Senator Jesse Helms’s admonition to his colleagues to “look at the pictures’’ during a battle over NEA funding of a Mapplethorpe show.

What I like most about “Mapplethorpe’’ is the way directors Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato don’t strain to turn the photographer into a saint, or a martyr, or anything romanticized. The interviewees, including Debbie Harry, younger brother and photographer Edward Mapplethorpe, and Bob Colacello don’t waste their breath hoisting Mapplethorpe up onto a pedestal. They make it clear he was ambitious and self-absorbed, and more and more so as he approached the end of his life. He preferred people who could help him in his quest for fame. In a wonderful turn of a phrase, Fran Lebowitz remembers Mapplethorpe as a “ruined cupid,’’ and she later confesses to having thrown out the pieces he once gave to her before he — and photography in general — were quite the thing.

With their honesty and passion, these New York art scene figures turn the documentary into something befitting its subject.

Matthew Gilbert can be reached at gilbert@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @MatthewGilbert.