Back in October, when documentary footage emerged of Nancy Pelosi from January 6, 2021 — footage whose juiciest elements included the then-speaker of the House saying she wished she could go to jail for punching the then-president of the United States — reactions from the right were predictable. And banal.

A frequent refrain around Twitter and other social media declared it mighty suspicious that on such an otherwise innocuous day, Nancy Pelosi would just happen to be followed by a documentary crew — as if this validated the idea that January 6 was a false flag operation. There was skeptical Zapruder-like analysis of what the footage did or did not show.

Let’s leave out whatever probative value the footage does or doesn’t have. Let the January 6 Committee decide. Or not. Let’s get to the first part of the conspiratorial blather: Alexandra Pelosi, not even vaguely coincidentally Nancy Pelosi’s daughter, is a solid and impressively prolific documentary filmmaker whose credits with HBO alone include 14 films, most characterized by the director’s intimate access to political figures. The idea that Alexandra Pelosi, who has been filming her mother in action for 20+ years, would have been filming Nancy Pelosi on January 6, 2021, is far less suspicious than the idea that she wouldn’t have been filming that day.

Pelosi’s combination of access journalism and familial access comes together in Pelosi in the House, the 14th film in that HBO collaboration. The 110-minute documentary is part hagiographic love letter from a daughter to her mother, part biography of a figure who has been, indisputably, among the most powerful women in the history of our republic and part fly-on-the-wall glimpse at the nature of a job that everybody knows is significant without always understanding what it entails.

The pieces don’t always fit together neatly and Alexandra Pelosi struggles with a subject whose façade is proudly impenetrable, but there are points at which Pelosi in the House is engaging and enlightening enough to make up for it being simultaneously choppy and rushed.

“For my entire adult life, I have been two steps behind you with this camera trying to keep up with you,” Alexandra tells her mother early in the documentary, a point she conclusively proves with several sequences devoted to the film’s dominant image, that of Nancy Pelosi racing down hallways in heels as her daughter runs along, capturing more linoleum than congresswoman. This is another important thing to note for those who wanted to imply that there must have been a 100-person crew complete with gaffers, a crane and craft services just loitering around on January 6. No, Alexandra Pelosi has a team, including editor Geof Bartz, but most of the documentary’s “crew” amounts to the filmmaker and her camera, easily explaining why she’s able to keep up and eavesdrop at so many pivotal moments. That and the “she’s my mom” thing.

Though its most poignant symbol is a daughter tagging along the halls of power after a famous parent — one that gains potency if remember that Nancy Pelosi’s own hasty ambling was in the footsteps of a father who served in Congress and as mayor of Baltimore — Pelosi in the House is at its best when Alexandra Pelosi has caught up with her mother.

I mean that when Pelosi in the House is a biography of Nancy Pelosi, it’s a pretty generic assemblage of footage reminding viewers of slightly different pantsuits and slightly different haircuts through a timeline that covers the Pelosi family legacy, follows her own early incursions into politics and then an ascension that started when she was elected to Congress in 1987. Alexandra Pelosi prefers a vérité style without talking heads or expert analysis and, in this case, the result is a lack of insight, especially into the years before the director began generating her own footage.

The documentary flounders when it’s dealing in generality, but finds a real rhythm in specificity. Like a thinner, more easily digestible version of Robert Caro’s The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Pelosi in the House thrives on process, the little details that capture an expert political operative at work.

For a certain sort of audience, “vote-counting” will always be gripping stuff, and my favorite section of the documentary is just one snippet after another of Pelosi working the phones to get support for the Affordable Care Act. Most of those phone conversations are one-sided and it’s a thrilling opportunity to track the different rhetorical strategies a leader has to take to cajole or intimidate supporters into toeing the line; the calls are made in the backs of hired cars, in the corner during family gatherings or in her office surrounded by her dedicated staff. It’s the little behind-the-scenes images, like Nancy Pelosi’s early, rudimentary at-home Zoom set-up during the COVID lockdown, that show the benefits of being in the room when landmark things happen.

The January 6 footage, which takes a solid 30 minutes in the documentary’s second half, isn’t always quite as enlightening, but it gives the doc the momentum of a breathless thriller at exactly the point it needs a jolt of energy. Accompanied by surveillance and outside footage from the insurrection, it shows the impossible task of people trying to keep their heads and restore order on a chaotic day. The urgency of elected officials being shuffled down hallways and into secured rooms or private garage chambers is an interesting complement to all of those shots of the filmmaking daughter following the dealmaking mother through halls.

Do I feel like I came away from Pelosi in the House with a new understanding of Nancy Pelosi as a person? Not really. It’s very, very limitedly a family portrait, with even husband Paul Pelosi reduced to walk-on cameos as kitchen interloper or bored party guest. As for Nancy herself, Alexandra repeatedly chides her about how resolutely she sticks to her message, and even the instances of Nancy Pelosi talking trash about Donald Trump — those lapses in decorum that I assume will cause aneurysms on Fox News — are the acts of a public figure with a clear sense of how her every word and deed can lead to protests or online mockery. Alexandra Pelosi might not dig beneath the different roles her mother plays, but I think she does a very good job of illustrating how and why Nancy has chosen her personae.

With the January 6 footage already generating buzz, I understand why HBO and the director have chosen to rush Pelosi in the House to air. There’s a leap between Joe Biden’s inauguration and Nancy Pelosi’s announcement that she won’t maintain her party leadership after the midterms that would feel abrupt even if we didn’t know that a lot of rather important stuff happened in the interim. It’s one of several times Pelosi in the House doesn’t really flow, where a four-hour docuseries might have done the overall story more justice.