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A DECADE BEFORE he began to make a film called Stevie, director Steve James (Hoop Dreams) befriended a boy named Stevie Fielding as an advocate, a Big Brother. He largely abandoned the relationship when he moved away, and when he returns, camera and crew in tow, it seems it's not so much to pick up the big-buddy conceit where it left off but to put the young man's sordid life on the big screen – a task that is heinous to most observers within the first uncomfortable minutes of the movie. One can feel the class food chain at work in this predatory practice, as if these out-of-the-way, poor, strange, or troubled characters are raised like farm animals for the slaughter of our cinematic pity. But the film quickly takes a strange turn when little Stevie, he of sweet-faced big lips, turns out to be not just a run-of-the-mill misfit in his Confederate flag chic, but one who's actively inflicting more pain on others: Stevie brags about beating his first wife and contends with allegations that he's molested a neighbor's young girl. Filmmaker Steve has to decide just how deeply to get involved with subject Stevie's real life as it gets exponentially more complicated right before his eyes. Does he bail him out of jail? Buy him a drink? Help him find God? Go fishin'? James chooses most of the above and lets the camera roll as he blunders through one of the most excrutiatingly honest relationships in the history of documentary film, exposing his own mistakes in the process. Stevie's unflinching eye deservedly won it the Sundance Film Festival's documentary cinematography prize this year. A more profound documentary would be hard to find. (Susan Gerhard)