lthough the SXSW Music Festival doesn't begin till tomorrow evening, the Film and Interactive festivals began last Friday. A few years ago when I was an associate editor, crazyglued to my phone and my deadlines while writers called me from the festival ("I'm getting drunk with Janeane Garofalo. It's awesome!"), I did not look forward to SXSW. It was just work times two. Same pay, double the grief. But now, as a freelance writer, it's different. I'll take any excuse to watch movies in the middle of the day.

As a rule, SXSW Film's strength is its documentaries. The festival's DIY focus - smart, indie, low-budget movies - seems to serve those films better, and the wealth of distribution opportunities for narratives - in the theatres, straight-to-video, or even online - are in stark contrast to the outlets for documentaries. Many of the docs shown at SXSW will eventually pop up on HBO or POV or PBS, but the rest will simply stump the festival circuit. One exception is "Stevie," getting theatrical distribution later this year by Lions Gate, and perhaps not surprisingly, it is the strongest documentary I've seen yet, an early choice for my festival favorite. "Stevie" is a documentary by Steve James, whose last film was the phenomenal Hoop Dreams. Here, James returns to the Southern Illinois trailer park life of Stevie, the boy he mentored through Big Brothers and Big Sisters a decade ago. Once a troubled child, Stevie has grown into a five-alarm nightmare, trailing a string of petty convictions and one mother of an upcoming trial that he may not beat. Stevie is a tough man to like, racist and beer-guzzling and foul, and yet it's hard not to soften to him or mitigate his crimes in light of a brutalized childhood, spent leapfrogging around foster homes. It's also a story about the people in Stevie's life - his bitter grandmother, the mother who abandoned him and tried to return, the sister whose stability and love is the family's lynchpin - but it's also about James himself, who places himself in front of the camera. When James films Stevie drunk and disastrous, he admits later to his own selfishness as a filmmaker - wanting Stevie to behave badly, disinclined to stop the train wreck, just so that he could have it on film. I go back an forth on these kind of authorial intrusions, but here's it's necessary. "Stevie" is a personal story, not only about how lives can go wrong but about what (if anything) we can do to help when it happens. Early in the film, I couldn't help but sympathize when James admitted he'd gotten in over his head with Big Brothers. He thought he would get big smiles and big hugs and feel like a big hero to a sweet little boy. Instead, he got Stevie - awkward, mean, self-hating - and like everyone else before, James didn't want him.
"Stevie" plays tomorrow at Westgate, 4:30pm. It will open in limited release this April.