Nonfiction filmmaking often has the ability to depict the passage of time — and all the emotional weight that can sometimes accompany that — with a lot more believability than what is regularly served up in any given cross-section of dramas and even other genre films. Beholden to tighter dictums of storytelling, narrative feature directors frequently lean into montages, or photos whose digital manipulation can often look just a bit off, even in cannily-framed quick glimpses. It’s understandable. After all, time is money and actors are for-hire performers; in a hypothetical story spanning a dozen years, few productions can accommodate, say, eight to 10 different hairstyles and lengths that a person might cycle through, and wigs can only accomplish so much.

If this seems an odd fixation and leaping-off point for a consideration of Garrett Bradley’s superb, Oscar-nominated Time, it’s only because this heartrending documentary — which delivers a searing indictment of the American justice system — both conveys and uses the mechanism of spent days and lost years so incredibly effectively. In a slim 81 minutes, unfolding in a meditative tone, it unpacks several shared lifetimes of love and despair. The result is one of the more stirringly unlikely but legitimately sincere epics of recent screen history.

The film tells the story of Sibil Fox Richardson, an indefatigable mother of six who works to free her husband Robert from the Louisiana State Penitentiary, where he’s serving a 65-year sentence without parole for a 1997 armed robbery conviction. The additional rub? Robert and Sibil, who had four sons at the time, committed the crime together, and Sibil was additionally pregnant with twins. Sentenced to 12 years, Sibil was released on parole and only three-and-a-half years.

Interweaving two decades’ worth of intimate home video material with expressive monochrome footage that charts the quotidian struggles of a family held hostage in a sort of soul-crushing purgatory, Bradley artfully uses building blocks of empathetic identification to achieve a genuine transcendence. The manner in which the film ends, with footage from the movie’s opening run in reverse, achieving a reclaimed life its subject cannot, is stirringly emotional.

The catch-all phrase “criminal justice reform” has many faces (including, unfortunately, a Kardashian), but few capture the multifaceted reality of that structural entreaty — and what it really means to the loved ones of those imprisoned for either nonviolent offenses and/or crimes committed in the stupid grip of youth — in as lived-in a fashion as Time. The daughter of a pair of abstract painters, Bradley approaches her subject matter with an open heart and a lyrical, hybridized style. The poetic result marks her as a unique, up-and-coming filmmaker to watch.

Time comes to the the Criterion Collection on Blu-ray with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer that is most often in a 1.89:1 aspect ratio (the use of archival footage from a variety of formats occasionally skews things). A 5.1 surround soundtrack was remastered from the original digital audio master files. Optional English subtitles are also available.

The disc’s bonus features are anchored by a new full-length audio commentary track from director Bradley, in which she chiefly unpacks a lot of the logistics involved in her film, as well as explaining some of her musical choices (Ethiopian composer Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou’s “The Mad Man’s Laughter”). Much credit is also shared with Sibil for her openheartedness and candor, even as Bradley ties in the Richardsons’ plight with those of over two million people grappling with incarcerated family members. A deeper excavation of editorial tinkering and avenues perhaps explored and eventually discarded would be interesting for some viewers, but there’s still plenty here to mark this as a worthwhile listen.

Next up, there’s a 22-minute sit-down interview conversation with the film’s protagonists, Sibil and Robert. While Criterion is a wonderful premium brand that offers loads of added value for cineastes, in some ways, for the lay consumer, this is probably the best supplemental extra on the disc, given the deeply bonded love it so clearly centers.

Bradley sits with critic Hilton Als for a 30-minute featurette, in a conversation which alights on both cinematic influences and the social issues the film puts under the microscope. Finally, there is a presentation of Bradley’s 2017 short film Alone, which won the Sundance Short Film Jury Award, and includes an optional audio commentary track with the subject of the movie. Additionally, in the form of a nice, foldout, accordion-style booklet, Criterion includes a director’s note from Bradley, a listing of crew information, and an interesting essay, “Time in the Mind,” from Doreen St. Felix.