Director of the acclaimed "Hoop Dreams," James finds his own past is nowhere near past when he returns to the dot of a town that is Pomona, Ill. Between 1982 and 1985, he was a Big Brother to Stevie Fielding, a kid with a glum history of foster homes and sexual abuse.

James first visits in 1995. Little blond-haired Stevie, with thick lips and thicker glasses, is now a dark-haired 26-year-old, a layabout covered in tattoos, with thick glasses and a thickening waist. Things haven't gone well for Stevie in the intervening years. As a series of book-'em police photos show, Stevie has been arrested for assault, possession of illegal weapons and credit fraud.

Living with his elderly stepgrandmother, Verna, Stevie still hates his mother, Bernice, whose trailer is about 50 yards away from theirs. He feels Bernice abandoned him as a kid (James gets a similar rap, without the white-hot rage). "The day she dies," he says of Bernice, "I'll go laugh at her grave."

"I always knew Stevie was an accident waiting to happen," James admits, as he bravely captures on camera his own obvious discomfort with the semimonster Stevie has become.

When he returns two years later, in 1997, that accident has happened. Stevie is in jail, accused of molesting his 8-year-old cousin. Family tensions have escalated. If convicted, Stevie faces between six and 10 years in prison.

James acknowledges that there were plenty of reasons for Stevie to end up like this; it's casually dropped that Stevie spent time in every available foster home in southern Illinois. But he doesn't excuse him, either. Nor does he let himself off the hook. Both appalled and apologetic, James examines his complicity in the wreck Stevie's life has become. And he wonders if he's interested in Stevie as Stevie or as a fascinating film project.

The movie is long -- 140 minutes -- but it doesn't feel so (promise). That's because of James' inherent dignity, coupled with his remarkable ability to get under the skin of these people. We become involved in the struggle of Brenda, Stevie's half-sister, and her husband, Doug, to have a child. (We are also treated to a bit of backcountry gender testing: Urinate into a cup of Drano; if it's blue, it's a boy, brown, it's a girl.)

Stevie's Aunt Wendy, the mother of the alleged molestation victim, is surprisingly eloquent as she discusses the incident. Bernice finds religion and we see her at church, looking happy and connected for the first time in the film.

There's the incongruity of a white supremacist friend of Stevie's wearing a "Les Miz" T-shirt and the uncomfortable suspicion that young Stevie became a pawn in the bitter family feud between Bernice and Vera, who defends him like an aging lioness.

Finally, there's a scene with Stevie's first foster parents, who took good care of him but also abandoned him when they moved away. The disturbing glint in Stevie's gaze softens into what it really is: the expression of an overgrown and confused child, finally at ease with himself in the presence of kindness and acceptance.

Perhaps the most important person in Stevie's adult life is his girlfriend, Tonya, a thin country-pretty young woman with an unspecified disability that causes her to twitch and speak like someone with cerebral palsy.

It's the pure-in-spirit Tonya who gives the troubled James the blessing he seeks, consciously or not. As the movie winds down and things aren't looking too bright for Stevie, she tells the filmmaker not everything is bad: "Something good came out of it. This film about you and him."

Bring Kleenex.