Stevie

dir. Steve James

Opens Fri April 11 at the Varsity.

The FIrst question to be addressed when discussing a film like Stevie, or any documentary that attempts to tell the story of a troubled person, is this: Who's exploiting whom? In the case of Stevie, directed by Steve James, finding that answer is a major component of the film's reason for being. James' Hoop Dreams set a new standard for real-life filmmaking which enters but doesn't invade the subject's world. In examining the socioeconomic impact of basketball on the lives of poor black families, James' cameras were welcomed into the players' houses; they left a mark, but also strove to keep a necessary distance. In Stevie, no such distance is possible, because the filmmaker and his conscience are two of the key characters, both on screen and off.

Stevie the subject is a man in his mid-20s who has suffered unspeakable abuse and injustice in his short life. His mother beat him until he couldn't speak, then abandoned him with a stepgrandmother, who later sent him to live in a foster home, where he was raped and neglected. He never even knew his father. Born into a life of boilerplate redneck poverty and disregard, Stevie showed all the signs of a terminal downward trajectory by his early teens; the system of social aid that exists to help kids like him was clearly doing him no good.

It was around this time, in the mid-'80s, that Steve James, then a graduate student, entered Stevie's life as a Big Brother. The time they spent together made a significant but obviously very different impact on both men. For the boy, it was one of the only incidences of human warmth ever to visit his increasingly violent and disaffected world; for the man, it was a source first of deep compassion, then of lingering guilt.

Their initial reunion, when James pulls up to Stevie's family homestead with cameras rolling, is one of the first scenes in the film, and the look on Stevie's wounded, wide-open face tells the whole story. Shirtless, dirty, and uneducated, Stevie is every inch a man-child: hungry for love, but seemingly incapable of knowing how to receive or return it; happy to be reunited with his Big Brother, but leery of any attempt to gain his trust; sweetly shy, but prone to bursts of violent braggadocio. James, meanwhile, shot in pensive profile, realizes how brazen his reappearance must seem, and pledges to stay in touch this time. Then, in voiceover, the filmmaker sheepishly admits that he "found reasons" to stay away for over two years. Over the course of the film that follows, we will discover both the depth of the rift in Stevie's psyche and the extent to which the filmmaker feels responsible for failing to help mend it.

In the intervening years between James' first and second visits, Stevie has been arrested for molesting his eight-year-old cousin. There's little doubt that he's guilty, given his history of violence and victimization--he fits the profile of a sex offender perfectly. But it's that same history that complicates the unfolding story. Once the crime is established, the film becomes a study in moral complexity--the more we get to know Stevie, through first-person exposure and from interviews with his grandmother, mother, sister, and extraordinary girlfriend, the more we're able to see a basically good person trapped in an unthinkable life. But as the film wears on, the reality of the crime he committed (and the revelation that it wasn't the first of its kind) never leaves the fore of the discussion, and in the meantime the filmmaker's continued presence becomes more than just observational. Because of his unique insider-outsider perspective on the situation, and because of the unique burden his cameras place on those involved, James is forced to answer for himself in ways most documentarians would never dare to show. Often as not--like when the victim's mother rages at the camera, or when Stevie asks James to loan him $100 for bail--he finds his answers to be grossly insufficient. But he keeps shooting, in hopes that the finished film will provide its own justification, which it unarguably does.

James isn't crafting an apologia, or some kind of social-injustice tract. The point of Stevie is more than just "man hands on misery to man." The point of Stevie is Stevie--a person, like all people, whose life is more than just the aggregate of unfortunate circumstances. What makes the film extraordinary is its admission that the consequences of that life belong not only to the person living it, but also the person filming it, and possibly those of us watching as well.