After decades, not just years, of battling brain cancer, San Francisco apartment finder/rental agent Jack Tuller decided to take charge of the one thing he could still control, the way his life ended.

Married, pushing 60 and with a circle of family and longtime friends, he’d throw a party and “go out with a blaze of glory.”

And as Jack had been a musician, artist and band manager in an earlier life, with at least one documentary filmmaker friend, he decided getting his “death with dignity” on film might be a way of battling the void and an eternity of anonymity.

“Jack Has a Plan” is his friend Bradley Berman’s documentary about Tuller’s life as it wound down, and his death and funeral. Tuller’s tale — years in the making — is a reminder that everybody has a story, and it’s rarely the one they “expect” to tell. “Jack” is engaging, even if this account of death and dying meanders a bit and plays as more emotionally flat than you’d expect.

Jack, it turns out, is estranged from his mother. Berman is there with his camera as Jack tries to rectify that. He’s there when Jack meets the father he never knew, witnesses their efforts at reconnecting after lives spent apart. Berman is there to document the cognitive decline, including older home videos the artistic Jack made about the earliest days after his diagnosis, the hope of “remission” and the bad news that he greets with the finality of “I’m not doing chemo.”

And he’s there right up to the end, and then after the end, with a charming funeral service that may be the most “San Francisco” thing about this movie.

Berman is a character in the film, debating this decision with Jack and other mutual friends and marveling at the fact that Jack knows he’s dying “and he’s cool with it.”

There have been other “death with dignity” documentaries, feature films and plays going all the way back to “‘Night, Mother.” This film is informative, letting us see the neighbor who shows Jack this choice, a neighbor who helped write California’s “End of Life Options Act.”

The film underscores Jack as a charmer who was well connected enough to pull all this together and pull off this “plan” — party, pharmaceutical suicide, funeral, all of it filmed. We all want to be remembered, and Jack seems oddly obsessed with that.

But there’s a utilitarian side to things as that “end of life care expert” (Torrie Fields) explains how it all works, and medical care professionals facilitate Jack’s plan, telling him and wife Jennifer (Jennifer Cariño) how it all will go down.

There’s poignance to Jack asking friends and family if they want to touch his skull (indentations from surgeries), his wife grappling with a hard and fast approaching date for her impending widowhood, and the father (Jack Ferrell) who does what he can to make up for lost time with a son he’s recently met and soon will lose.

Still, I’ve seen more moving accounts of such exits over the years. The “debate” in such stories always seems settled before the camera rolls. Otherwise there’s no movie. There’s pathos, but little drama or genuine confict.

But the subtext of many such documentaries is more keenly felt here. “Why doesn’t every state allow this?”

Rating: unrated

Cast: Jack Tuller, Jennifer Cariño, Jack Ferrell, Torrie Fields, Jonathan Lemon and Bradley Berman.

Credits: Written and directed by Bradley Berman. A PBS release.

Running time: 1:12