A documentary by Ethan Hawke. Rating unavailable.

First-time doc-maker Ethan Hawke borrowed the title Seymour: An Introduction from J.D. Salinger’s cycle of tales about the fictional Glass family. If he hadn’t died at the end of “A Perfect Day for Bananafish”, the most autobiographical Glass sibling would be about the same age as Seymour Bernstein, 85 when he met the Boyhood star.

This brilliant and surprisingly healthy-looking pianist comes from the same Eastern European Jewish stock as Salinger, with tough immigrant parents with little patience for artistic offspring. Just as it cramped Salinger’s output, this homemade crisis of confidence dampened the musician’s concert career, which ended at 50, with the lifelong New Yorker’s switch to full-time teaching and occasional composition.

Introducing his subject’s first public concert in decades, Hawke explains that he met Bernstein randomly, and confided in him his own crippling stage fright at the time. To his credit, the actor turned filmmaker rarely appears on-screen and never mentions his side careers in music and literature.

But Hawke’s deep affection for all parts of the creative process permeates the under-90-minute movie, and he unobtrusively (thanks to unusually deft editing) captures people able to illuminate its particulars with exceptional wit and perception.

These include Bernstein (no relation to Leonard), who recalls entertaining troops at the frontlines of the Korean War, along with several musical colleagues and former students, like Michael Kimmelman, now an architecture critic for the New York Times. All describe the interwoven nature of musical and personal harmony—the pursuit of which has completely dominated Bernstein’s monklike exis­tence. He skirts around his personal history, but we know he has lived alone in a one-room Manhattan apartment for almost six decades. Chopin, Schubert, and Beethoven may be his steadiest companions.

He teaches at home, too, for a stream of youngsters arriving from around the globe. He himself learned from the likes of Nadia Boulanger, Georges Enescu, and England’s Clifford Curzon, whom he seemingly helped attain a well-deserved knighthood. Bernstein’s master classes at NYU, seen at some length in this inspiring Introduction, are marvels in wry personal persuasion. His students are already at a very high skill level when he meets them, but they’re playing poetry when he’s done.