Susan Morgan’s An Unlikely Weapon: The Eddie Adams Story has an aesthetic blandness that would likely have turned off its subject, the famed photojournalist behind the iconic, Pulitzer Prize-winning 1968 snapshot of Saigon police chief Nguyen Ngoc Loan executing a Vietcong soldier. Many, including Tom Brokaw and Peter Jennings, contend that picture helped end the Vietnam War by bringing home the brutal, horrific awfulness of the conflict. And though Morgan’s non-fiction techniques are only serviceably straightforward, the director engagingly makes clear that Adams’ most renowned image haunted him but did not, ultimately, define his work, which eventually included photos from thirteen wars, of six United States presidents, and of virtually every notable culture figure from the past fifty years. A cantankerous “pain in the ass” who started with the AP and ended as an independent entrepreneur, he was an individual who lived life on his own terms, and whose career embodied the notion that greatness isn’t found in the attainment of perfection, but in the striving for it.

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