Stevie

Documentarian Steve James, who directed Hoop Dreams, presents a more intimate but equally piercing slice of life in this very personal account of his reconnection with Stephen Dale Fielding, a southern Illinois man to whom he'd been a Big Brother a decade earlier. Stevie is as much a tale of dashed hopes and the effects of environment as Hoop Dreams was, but the locale is a small rural town rather than the urban blight of south-side Chicago. Fielding was a troubled youth when the director mentored him in the early '80s--a boy abandoned by his mother, raised for a time by step-grandparents, and periodically turned over to the state foster care system. By the time James sought him out again in 1995, Stevie was a derelict living in a trailer in his hometown, at odds with virtually all the members of his family; and--by 1997--he was in serious legal trouble. There's a sad, pathetic sense of inevitability to his story, which James recounts incisively, making good use of interviews with the young man and his relatives (although the director inserts himself rather insistently into the narrative; the picture is a sort of confession of failure on his part, too). While the film's two-and-a-half hour running time is somewhat self-indulgent, Stevie is a highly revealing study of a life apparently doomed from the start. Highly recommended. [Note: DVD extras include audio commentary by director Steve James, co-cinematographer Dana Kupper, co-producer/co-cinematographer Gordon Quinn, and producer Adam Singer; five deleted scenes (8 min.); and trailers. Bottom line: a small but solid extras package for a powerful documentary.] (F. Swietek)