Two days. The man who wrote Dark Passage gets his night back.

He sold in the millions and died a name nobody could place. Dark Passage became a Bogart and Bacall picture; Shoot the Piano Player became Truffaut. The man himself went back to Philadelphia and drove his mother’s streets in the dark until his heart quit at forty-nine.

The restored cut of Retracing the Footsteps of David Goodis gives the story a night that is actually his — regraded frame by frame, the pulp covers rescanned, the sound rebuilt from nothing so his words come through over the rain instead of drowning under it. That was the whole problem with the old version, and it is fixed.

That kind of attention is the difference between a finished documentary and a placeholder. Whether the subject is a New Orleans institution, an executive, a public-safety story, or a working artist, the audience deserves images and sound that let the person finish the thought.