Viewed through the fog of high school chess club and the girls who coldly rebuffed my Spanish Bishop, it is easy to forget just how popular chess once was. Not just as a game played by awkward adolescents, but as a mainstream event on par with the Superbowl or the World Cup finals. Bars and shop windows were given over to excited spectators huddled round TVs to watch the games unfold. In an era more commonly defined by scandal and tragedy, news bulletins were known to lead not with Watergate or Munich, but the latest exchanges between Petrosian and Karpov; how unthinkable that would seem just a few years later.

As it was, in 1972 everybody knew about Bobby Fischer. Against a backdrop of escalating tensions, that summer’s championship against Boris Spassky was hyped as nothing less than David versus the Soviet Goliath; a thinking man’s Rocky and Ivan Drago, in a pairing that encapsulated the hopes of warring nations. The authoritarian grip of the Russia Federation was widely reported in the west, their players intensively trained from a young age to exemplify the intellectual prowess of the Communist state. In comparison, America seemed to adopt a more laissez faire attitude – their hopes laid not with farmed prodigies, but on a reclusive eccentric named Bobby Fischer, whose outlandish demands befitted a wildly unpredictable style of play.

Fischer’s childhood was an infamously unhappy one. His mother Regina, a determined activist profiled by the CIA, was lost in the face of her son’s apparent autism, often leaving him to spend hours at a time alone with a chess board. Whilst other children his age enjoyed sleepovers and games in the park, Fischer’s intellect and lifestyle were conspiring to place him against the brightest and the best. He beat them all. “Sure, he had an exceptional mind” reflects a talking head, “but genius isn’t only about an innate gift, but a desire and willingness to sacrifice.”

A childhood beset by loneliness underpins the rise and fall of the last great chess player, and ‘Against the World’ shares extraordinary footage of a country transfixed by a chequered spectacle. In the build up to those games with Spassky, Fischer proves an elusive figure. Arriving in Iceland just days before play was due to begin, he was in no mood to engage with the media circus that awaited him, foiling the jostling reporters by taking refuge in a friend’s house. Upon being told that his host’s father was dying, the detached wonder was characteristically nonplussed. “Oh, I don’t mind”, Bobby shrugged, before returning to his practice.

When they did finally get under way, the matches were largely relayed by impartial observers, Fischer having furiously demanded that the cameras be removed so he could concentrate. Looking back, so much of the series speaks to the paranoia of the time: crushed by an early defeat, Spassky became convinced that the CIA had employed radiating devices to influence his play. An examination of the playing area returned only the ominous spectre of two dead flies.

Liz Garbus directs with confidence, and palpable excitement is wrung from footage that remains stubbornly removed from the action. Yet her truly decisive move comes in a second half that attempts to piece together the strange events that followed: how Fischer disappeared almost overnight, only to emerge decades later as a conspiratorial provocateur on the run from the US government. Garbus unearths a recording, made a day after the attacks of 9/11, in which Fischer – whose family was Jewish – phones in to a local radio station to rant about a Zionist conspiracy. At a press conference afterwards, he becomes embroiled in an ugly scene with a reporter, whose father he once counted as a friend, now dismissed as “a typical Jewish snake” who publically disavowed him. For a moment, there is silence. “Honestly” the reporter sighs, as if seeing his boyhood hero suddenly befallen, “I don’t think you’ve done much here to disprove anything he said”.

Quite how a man of Fischer’s superior intellect found himself washed ashore aboard such abhorrent ideas will never be known, but it makes for fascinating viewing. If by the end it remains difficult to forgive his transgressions, ‘Bobby Fischer Against The World’ makes a compelling case for remembering him as one of defining greats, as much of a machine as IBM’s Deep Blue. Adopting a style that was both efficient and ruthless, he became a Grandmaster at just 15, later reigning as the world number one for five years. In the history of chess, just 10 players have achieved a so-called ‘perfect score’ in championship play. In 1971, Fischer did it twice in succession and never looked back.

He died, aged 64, with a photo of his mother and sister at his side. Human, after all.