I was in my early teens when I first encountered Art Spiegelman’s Maus, the devastating and deeply personal portrait of his father and the Holocaust. At the time, I routinely devoured the likes of Sandman, Harvey Crumb, and Belgian masters like Hergé. The inclusion of a black and white comic with anthropomorphic animals depicting the horrors of Nazi Germany stood out. I didn’t know what to make of it, only that it stopped me in my tracks. Even after reading it, I couldn’t parse the complex emotions it awakened.

Two decades later, Maus reveals itself to me anew with every passing year. It is a work of tremendous importance, but also a revealing and painfully earnest dialog between reader and artist that feels like a mirror. Every time I peek in, I see something else looking back.

This documentary, directed by Molly Bernstein and Philip Dolin, doesn’t give answers to the mystery of Maus, nor does it push or prod its artist beyond what is friendly. But it’s such a gentle and compelling portrait that I felt nourished just having seen it. Filmed over the course of multiple years, Disaster Is My Muse feels like a visit from an old friend.

The thing that stood out to me the most is how present, articulate, and vibrant Spiegelman still is. It shouldn’t surprise me, he’s still a youthful man in his 70s, but he was already there, fully formed, when I first brushed against Maus in the public library. There never was a world without Spiegelman. That’s time for you.

Which is why documentaries like this matter. They open a window to the creator and we get a glimpse of the intent on the form, if not the content. Spiegelman reveals how intentional his framing grew as he wrote Maus, and how he struggled with certain aspects of his elaborate metaphor. He doesn’t go into the depths of what some images mean to him, and it’s probably for the best. Over-explaining serves no one.

Spiegelman’s wife and art editor of The New Yorker, Francoise Mouly, is a presence in her own right. Her point of view anchors Spiegelman’s battles with his father and his faith, and it’s remarkable to see the dynamics between these two artists who’ve shared their lives together.

Even though the film covers quite a bit of time in Spiegelman’s life, it ends just as the world shifts into a darker period. Trump gains power, and fascism rises on the horizon. Spiegelman comments how we never learn. If anything, now is the time for Maus to be remembered, and re-remembered all over again. In that sense, there is no documentary as timely as this. If only to remind us of the humanity behind it all, and how much we have to cherish even as we cling to painful memories of our past.