For Whom the Bell Tolls, HBO’s documentary on Sen. John McCain, plays like the kind of tribute that, at the risk of sounding cold, ordinarily surfaces after the subject has died.

While McCain has been diagnosed with terminal brain cancer, he’s still quite with us at the moment, so he could conceivably be in the audience when HBO premieres the Peter Kunhardt production Monday at 8 p.m. ET.

For Whom the Bell Tolls isn’t all accolades. Kunhardt also notes low points in McCain’s eventful life, and the subject himself weighs in on some of the less admirable ones.

Still, on the whole, the documentary tilts heavily toward complimentary and at times flirts with worshipful. McCain comes across as a principled man in an increasingly unprincipled profession, perhaps an increasingly unprincipled world.

Kunhardt makes a good part of his case for that positive portrayal in an unexpected way. His many interview subjects include only a couple of McCain’s fellow Republicans and almost a who's who of Democrats.

Former Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama both praise McCain’s personal honor and political pragmatism. Former presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and John Kerry speak of his inquiring mind and willingness to engage in civil dialogue on disagreements. Former Vice President Joe Biden almost breaks down when recalling his friendship with McCain, and former vice presidential candidate Joe Lieberman hails his character.

McCain returns the compliment to Lieberman by saying that if he had to run his 2008 presidential campaign over again, he would stick to his original instinct and nominate Lieberman as his running mate. Lieberman, of course, was the Democratic candidate for that same gig in 2000.

McCain himself speaks at length about courage, honesty and honor, the qualities he most values and has tried hardest to incorporate into his life. 

If he failed to say he favored the removal of the Confederate flag from the South Carolina capitol building in 2000, because he feared it could cost him the state’s Republican presidential primary, he has at other times stepped away from his party’s line. He co-sponsored campaign finance reform legislation limiting big donations. He rebuked Republican leadership by voting against a high-priority 2017 health care reform bill he felt did not properly do the job (left).

Kunhardt leaves it unsaid that for the vast majority of his 35-year political career, McCain has been a loyal Republican soldier whose priorities have included a strong insistence we “win” the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

But For Whom the Bell Tolls isn’t designed as a career report card. It’s more a retrospective on the fascinating path of a man who was born into a family of Navy admirals and likely would have followed that path himself if he hadn’t been shot down over North Vietnam in 1967 and spent the next five years in a prisoner of war camp.

Plateaued in the Navy because of his war injuries, he turned to politics.

His personal life included leaving his first wife and their children to marry a younger woman, with whom he had a second family. Both wives are interviewed here, and while first wife Carol says she was blindsided by his abandonment, she still speaks well of him.

The kids say the divorce was painful but seems now to be largely in the past – which is where everyone agrees that McCain himself puts the unpleasant parts of his life, from his POW years (below) to the 1980s Keating Five scandal that could have cost him his career.

For Whom the Bell Tolls does not mention the sneering cheap shot by then-candidate Donald Trump in 2016 that when it came to McCain, he preferred heroes who didn’t get captured.

McCain has taken the high road on that one, saying that in politics, you learn to let insults roll off your back. But in the final scene of For Whom the Bell Tolls, when McCain sharply attacks the shortsightedness of closed-minded nationalism, it’s hard not to fill in Trump’s name.

The documentary refers several times to McCain’s notorious hot temper and short fuse. It notes that his 2008 campaign, in contrast to his 2000 primary run, limited press access – because, McCain explains here, too many reporters in 2008 had shifted to a nastier “gotcha” mentality.  

America has just generally become a more us-against-them country, For Whom the Bell Tolls suggests, and one of the reasons it so admires McCain is his belief in conciliation and common ground.

That’s certainly a core of the singular legacy he has earned – and it’s satisfying that he’s around to smell some of the roses.