RUTHFULLY YOURS

Either of those two elements might have been ambitious enough to fill a conventional feature. This one, which runs a few minutes more than three hours, is filled to overflowing, though only occasionally does it seem overlong. (An extended sequence about the avant-garde scene in postwar Dusseldorf conspicuously verges on self-parody.) And as befits a story about the visual arts, it was shot by the great American cinematographer Caleb Deschanel, who gave us the peerlessly pure images in Carroll Ballard’s “The Black Stallion.”

Mr. Donnersmarck’s artist hero, Kurt Barnert (Tom Schilling), offers a perfect pretext for re-examining his nation’s calamitous past, from the rise of the Nazis before World War II through postwar division to unification in unimagined peace and prosperity. “Never Look Away” is equally about the suffering Kurt’s family endures during much of that time, and about Kurt’s art—how he makes it, how it changes him and those it touches. The details of his life sometimes hew closely to those of Mr. Richter’s; at other times they’re freely fictionalized. (The fraught relationship between the filmmaker and Mr. Richter, arguably the world’s pre-eminent living artist, was recently examined in a New Yorker piece by Dana Goodyear.) Rich as the film may be in aesthetic considerations—very rich indeed—it’s the startling arc of Kurt’s life story that sustains the dramatic narrative.

The title is taken from advice that Kurt, as a wide-eyed little boy in prewar Dresden, receives from his beloved aunt Elisabeth May (Saskia Rosendahl), a young and luminous spirit but an anguished one. “Never look away,” she tells him. “Everything that is true is beautiful.” Her linkage of truth and beauty is harshly tested. Torn from her family by pitiless Nazis under horrific circumstances, Elisabeth becomes Kurt’s link to subsequent events that continue to haunt him until he gives his swirling memories new form.

Before Kurt finds success, which is painfully slow to come—about as slow as his process of self-discovery—he finds love in the person of Ellie Seeband, a fellow art student played by Paula Beer. (She was a revelation two years ago as the grief-stricken young woman in François Ozon’s “Frantz,” and she’s lovely here.) He doesn’t know that her father, Professor Carl Seeband, is a war criminal, and that one of his many monstrous crimes was inflicted, albeit indirectly, on Kurt’s Aunt Elisabeth. (Professor Seeband, a distinguished gynecologist by profession and a fanatical eugenicist by conviction, is played by Sebastian Koch, who was the good-hearted playwright Georg Dreyman in “The Lives of Others.”)

If that twist seems convenient or conventional, the way Kurt’s art pulls the plot threads together is anything but. Many of Gerhard Richter’s paintings of photographs are distinguished by a blurring effect that calls attention to their paintedness while heightening their ambiguity. The film applies blurs of its own, and not just to the line between fact and fiction. Kurt’s approach to his work isn’t conscious, or even unconsciously but accessibly associative, like that of the W.S. Gilbert character in another fine film about the creative process, Mike Leigh’s “Topsy Turvy.” No ecstasy follows this agony, no answers are revealed about national or family history. We don’t know how much Kurt comes to know, or intuit, as he turns family snapshots and found photos into new and mysterious works of art.

But knowing isn’t our business or his, the movie suggests; doing and feeling are what matters. “After the Nazi catastrophe only art can give the people a sense of freedom,” says Kurt’s art-school professor in Dusseldorf. “Never Look Away” makes an eloquent case for art as an expression of hope, a way of searching for meaning in chaos.