In 1971 Jerry Lewis, America’s most famous comedian, decided to swing for the fences and make his masterpiece. The Day the Clown Cried was a Holocaust tale about Helmut Doork, a hapless party entertainer who becomes a death camp pied piper. Lewis starred and directed, overseeing every aspect of a fraught shoot in Sweden, but the man misstepped badly and the film never saw the light of day. It has since become legend, buried forever and apparently for good reason.

Now along comes Michael Lurie and Eric Friedler’s flawed but engrossing documentary to pick over the wreckage, shine a UV lamp on the crime scene and – best of all – reveal extended segments of a picture that is destined to remain incomplete. For much of its running time, From Darkness to Light is a jerry-rigged cuttings job, lifting talking-head interviews from Ferne Pearlstein’s 2016 documentary The Last Laugh and folding them alongside fresher insights from the likes of Martin Scorsese and Harry Shearer, one of the few living souls to have actually seen the rough cut. The star attraction here, however, is Lewis himself, talking freely to Friedler shortly before his death in 2017. The Day the Clown Cried, he says, was almost wonderful, almost perfect, which is another way of saying that it was an absolute catastrophe.

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Lurie and Friedler’s handling of the material sometimes feels perfunctory, but the tale they tell is purely fascinating. Lewis looks so stricken by the ordeal that he risks confusing himself with Helmut. It’s as if, in failing to complete and release his film, he was somehow doomed to keep it with him forever, replaying the script’s darkest moments as though they had really happened. “There’s not a day in my life when I don’t think about it,” he says. “I remember walking 65 children into the oven. It was hard, very hard.” Horribly misconceived and appallingly handled, The Day the Clown Cried convinced none of the handful of people who saw it. But it cast a spell on its creator and would haunt him to the grave.