As the opening credits of the documentary “Sunday Best” roll, Billy Preston in a killer chartreuse suit takes to “The Ed Sullivan Show” stage. Ray Charles pounds the keyboards and brass players ready to enter a sped-up version of “Agent Double-O-Soul.”

From the get-go, Sacha Jenkins’s film about the variety show trailblazer Ed Sullivan and his commitment to Black performers, entwined as it became with the Civil Rights Movement, keeps us hooked. It’s not just the trove of archival performances — Stevie Wonder, Nina Simone, James Brown — that persuade. It’s observations from legends and friends; among them Harry Belafonte, Smokey Robinson and the Motown impresario Berry Gordy.

A music journalist-turned-filmmaker, Jenkins had the hip-hop bona fides to guarantee “Sunday Best” would not be a white savior tale. Instead, his film reveals the authentic amity and steadfast values of an ally. As a young sportswriter, Sullivan denounced N.Y.U.’s football program for benching a Black player when the University of Georgia came to town.

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