Stevie Fielding, the victim/victimizer at the center of the film, is surrounded by a web of neighbors, helpers and kin whose distinct voices and unschooled theatricality bring his life story to a powerful level of documentary intensity. Director Steve James finds archetypes in unsung lives as he did in his Hoop Dreams. Stevie’s patient girlfriend, for example, possesses all the warmth and humanity one wishes Stevie could attain; his aunt reveals Stevie’s crimes with ferocious maternal fury. The film shows the power that a filmmaker can hold over his subject. Indeed, James’s voiceover says that “Stevie had wanted to be in this film mostly to spend time with me, and here I was, repaying him, by putting his tortured life on display”—an honest insight about the nature of documenting the lives of people less fortunate than ourselves.  NK