This week I’ve been watching the long-form documentary film Country Boys on PBS. If you haven’t seen it, I can’t recommend it highly enough; it’s utterly compelling television. And if you haven’t heard about it, you obviously don’t watch enough PBS because they’ve been advertising the hell out of it.

In this case, however, the hype is justified. The film (or series, if you prefer, since it is being shown in three parts) is, as I said, utterly compelling. Filmmaker David Sutherland spent three years following the lives of two “at-risk” teenage boys as they came of age in the poverty-stricken hills of Kentucky’s Appalachian region. The end result, like Sutherland’s previous film project, The Farmer’s Wife, derives great drama and pathos from the mundane struggles of the most ordinary of people. This is an unrelentingly honest film that neither mocks its subjects for their origins nor assigns them a false nobility — it simply shows us who they are. Cody is an unlikely combination of devout faith and renegade appearance (he sports multiple piercings and plays guitar in a “Christian goth-thrash-metal band,” whatever the hell that is). Chris is practically a walking stereotype of the Appalachian male, a boy who lives with his alcoholic father in a beaten-down trailer located “in the holler.” When I was their age, I wouldn’t have associated with either of them, because of what they appear to be: two different flavors of white-trash loser. But Sutherland’s film reveals the truth — they’re basically good kids, smart kids who want more from their lives than their backgrounds would seem to offer. Watching them stumble into setbacks and make obviously incorrect decisions makes for frustrating viewing, but that’s only because you’ve come to genuinely like these kids.

Some people will no doubt kvetch about the film’s 6-1/2 hour runtime and the occasional slow patches; however, I think the length is partly why Country Boys works. It gives you time to really get to know Chris and Cody, to see and, more importantly, to feel what their lives are really like. This is genuine reality television, not some staged, artificial game being played by shallow, synthetically pretty people, and in the end, it’s both heartbreaking and inspiring. In other words, this is what motion pictures and television are supposed to be.

Country Boys is a PBS production, so it’s sure to repeat a couple of times; watch your local listings for it. Also, I understand the DVD will be available next Tuesday. I urge all of my three loyal readers to seek it out…