A lot of documentaries about people known for one spectacular achievement or career often talk about their singular vision, how they almost came out of the womb fully formed with a goal and set about reaching it from their formative years. Steve Jobs had a mission to personalise computing for the masses (or at least seemed to). Even Hitler's ambitions, shaped by his military service and misplaced national pride, never wavered.

Something this story of Jim Henson's life reveals that maybe isn't very clear or even intended is that he evidently wasn't like that. The only time it talks about him really falling in love with something and wanting to make it his life's work was when he discovered television.

You might assume he loved puppets, education or even kids and the cultural artefacts we know him for – Sesame Street, The Muppets – were a way to realise those dreams. But immediately before he and his company (consisting of his then-wife) got a contract to do the educational kids show that would become Sesame Street, he had an idea for a nightclub based on a groundbreaking light show.

It seemed like, even though he had a lot of ideas (as the title suggests), they were all very different from each other and he pursued whichever one caught his fancy at the time. What he seemed driven by was just the technology of the moving image, and when Sesame Street became such a juggernaut he just rode that and became the puppet guy for the rest of his career.

None of which is intended to take away from his achievements or talent. He was indeed an innovator, as the movie claims, inventing a new art form by combing the mechanics of marionettes and puppets (which gave us the name of his most beloved characters).

Through accident and happenstance he then came across the collaborators who'd augment his ideas and become icons in their own right like Frank Oz and Dave Goelz, and his legend and everything surrounding it was set.

The film roughly charts the chronology of his life, growing up a regular enough man in the relative innocence of postwar Middle America, getting married and having kids, the only real difference being that he and his wife didn't go and become factory workers or secretaries, they made puppet shows for TV that got gradually increasing followings and led to later work that went global.

We learn about the formation of Sesame Street and The Muppets, much less about Fraggle Rock and The Storyteller, but it has some fascinating trivia about them both as well as the Henson team's foray into movies. I for one have always loved Labyrinth and had no idea it was a box office flop, and I also never knew The Muppet Show was filmed entirely in England.

It also, using interviews from today and archive footage of Henson himself, paints him as being as normal and genial a guy as you'd care to meet.

He never seemed to have any real artistic pretensions, treated everybody around him with respect and camaraderie, and despite the film's claim of him having a constant flow of creative ideas, he seems like an everyday guy who lucked into a stellar career, not an abrasive and temperamental genius whose belief in his own ability came before anything or anyone else.

Director Ron Howard manages to give it a melodic, slightly cartoony tone befitting most of the work Henson did, but getting to know the guy's amazing life and untimely death is what you're there for, so the rest is really just set dressing.