By STEPHEN HOLDEN NY Times

To say that Phil Spector, the reclusive record producer who created the quasi-symphonic “wall of sound” heard on 1960s hits by the Ronettes and the Crystals, has a mammoth ego is an understatement. During the rare, extended interview that forms the spine of Vikram Jayanti’s creepily riveting documentary portrait, “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Phil Spector,” he compares himself to Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Bach and Galileo.

The word “art,” as in high art, is repeatedly and defensively invoked by Mr. Spector to describe his own work. As he repeatedly exalts his own importance, your admiration for his “little symphonies for kids,” as he calls his blasts of emotion-charged sound, may be tinged with revulsion. In mod clothes and a bowl wig, Mr. Spector (now 70) suggests a pathetic rock ’n’ roll Napoleon in exile, caught in a time warp. Sensing the insecurity and paranoia behind his grandiosity, you may wonder if these aural monuments to teenage dreams were built on sand.

The interview was conducted at Mr. Spector’s mansion in a Los Angeles suburb, between his first and second trials in the murder of Lana Clarkson, a struggling 40-year-old actress whose lackluster audition reel is shown in the film. The first trial ended in 2007 in a hung jury. At his 2009 trial, Mr. Spector was convicted of second-degree murder and is serving a sentence of 19 years to life.

The film makes an audacious conceptual leap by juxtaposing dull television footage of the first trial with a music video soundtrack ofSpector-produced records. The procession begins with his funereal 1958 hit for the Teddy Bears, “To Know Him Is to Love Him,” which he explains was written about his father, who shot himself to death when Mr. Spector was a boy. Commenting on the songs are wildly hyperbolic footnotes by the British journalist Mick Brown. One number in particular, the Crystals’ recording of Gerry Goffin and Carole King’s “He Hit Me (and It Felt Like a Kiss),” is used as an obvious cross-reference to the murder.

As Mr. Spector discusses record production, his work with the Beatles (he completed and mixed the unfinished tapes for their final album, “Let It Be,” and collaborated with John Lennon and George Harrison on solo projects), his accomplishments speak for themselves; he was a pop giant mingling with rock ’n’ roll deities at a moment when people believed in them.

An unseemly amount of the interview is devoted to the settling of scores. A social pariah in high school, Mr. Spector sneers at the classmates who ostracized him, dismissing them as “nothing.” He harbors an antipathy for Tony Bennett, whose late-blooming success onMTV sticks in his craw. The story of Martin Scorsese’s appropriation of the Ronettes’ “Be My Baby” without permission for the opening scene of “Mean Streets” is raked over as if it were today’s hot headline news.

He questions the status of Buddy Holly, because Holly had only three years of fame before he died. Describing Brian Wilson’s obsession with decoding the sound of “Be My Baby” as “demented,” he goes on to dismiss the Beach Boys’ “Good Vibrations” as “an edit record.”

The parallels to Mr. Wilson go very deep. As teenagers, both Mr. Spector and Mr. Wilson were lonely outsiders whose hits longingly conjured the thrill of being young, beautiful, sexy and in love in a teenage heaven of surfboards and motorcycles. Who could resist stepping into the dream?

Waking up, however, can be traumatic. Mr. Spector’s solitary life in a mansion surrounded by guns and memorabilia that includes the white piano Lennon played in a music video for “Imagine” recalls nothing so much as the deluded Norma Desmond’s secluded existence in “Sunset Boulevard.” Until his incarceration, Mr. Spector lived in the same kind of bubble.

THE AGONY AND THE ECSTASY OF PHIL SPECTOR

Opens on Wednesday in

Manhattan.