The new documentary about Fred Rogers is an actual sleeper hit, in that its profundity will lie in wait and hit you in waves hours after leaving the theater. After it’s enveloped you for 94 minutes in archival footage from his 40 years of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, interviews with a wildly theorizing young Rogers and then the wizened turn-of-the-millennium TV veteran, and original testimony from friends and family who allay the inevitable doubt and then some: Yes, they all say, he really was that way in real life.

His tender teaching of every child’s self-worth—“You’ve made this day a special day by just being you,” Rogers tells us from the screen, “There’s no person in the whole world like you, and I like you just the way you are”—applies to adults, too. Viewers will be forgiven for tearing up at the twinkling intro to the show’s theme song, and the hopeful invitation, “Won’t you be mine?” (The weekday matinee I went to was stocked with criers.) Reviews of Oscar-winning documentarian Morgan Neville’s Won’t You Be My Neighbor? rarely miss the contextual contrast that casts the tender spirit of Rogers’ show as a balm for our bitter and angry age. Neville sets us up to see this. It’s hard to imagine Fred Rogers, who died in 2003, would have minded a timely new spin on his life’s work. His presence, in select theaters, succors weary hearts while the national news ratchets up our nightmares. And this, Neville reminds us, isn’t a new role for Rogers.