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Raoul Peck’s documentary about George Orwell and his enduring relevance takes as its keynote the heretical masterpiece Nineteen Eighty-Four and its famous scene about the state compelling people to believe whatever it says is the truth: that two and two make five. That Orwellian anti-arithmetic of tyranny has become a political meme often repeated in social media debates about gender politics, although these are not mentioned here, perhaps because they are not considered sufficiently important. This is a serious and worthwhile film, though one that tells you what you know already, and yet somehow perhaps doesn’t tell you enough.

The simple experience of hearing Orwell’s prose, both from his published work and letters and diaries, read aloud by Damian Lewis, is invigorating and refreshing. There’s an interesting emphasis on Orwell’s physical frailty, with him effectively composing his masterwork in the shadow of death. It was written, as he put it, “under the influence of tuberculosis”. That such a fierce, muscular, assertive book should be conceived under this influence is a startling thought, and Peck amusingly juxtaposes Orwell’s sickness with Winston Smith being made to do exercises and the infatuation of tyrannical regimes with public displays of physical fitness. Perhaps it is truer to say that Nineteen Eighty-Four was written under the influence of cigarettes and their unregretted consequences.

Peck cites various movie and TV adaptations of Nineteen Eighty-Four (with, variously, Peter Cushing and John Hurt as Winston Smith) and includes footage of Jura, where Orwell went to live, perhaps in retreat from the clamour and contradiction of London’s political existence. We see archive photo records of Orwell’s childhood, and his early working life as a policeman in Burma and his consequent disgust with colonialism and state-sanctioned cruelty, along with the levels of mendacity, euphemism and mind-control that are necessary to justify it. The antique archive material and footage are brought into alignment with 4K video of the modern Orwell nightmare: Trump, Orban, Modi, Netanyahu, Putin. The film also shows us how Orwell predicted the rise of AI in propaganda and in soulless bread-and-circuses for the masses, degraded and degrading.

There is an interesting clip of Milan Kundera recounting his conversion to Orwell on realising that his view was that totalitarian regimes effectively force everything to be political – that is, force their own politics on to your every waking moment, which is a very different thing from saying that art can’t or shouldn’t be political. Also noteworthy is the quotation from Orwell to the effect that totalitarian regimes are theocracies. Peck’s film falls down in not focusing on actual theocracies of the present day (with the arguable exception of Israel) and the Orwellian qualities of Isis and Hamas. The question of how far Orwell renounced his own earlier antisemitic tendencies is not entirely addressed in this film, other than to cite his hostility to Sartre’s Reflections on the Jewish Question and to make a claim, which needed more substantiation, that antisemitism is just weaponised Newspeak.

Orwell was disliked by some on the left for daring to write Nineteen Eighty-Four and disliked still more with the revelation 30 years ago that in 1949 he had handed over to British authorities the names of 38 public figures he considered “crypto-communists” – a fact from which this film averts its eyes. But Orwell’s complications don’t compromise his genius for truth-telling. Maybe art and life can’t be made to add up.

• Orwell: 2+2=5 is in UK and Irish cinemas from 27 March.