`AMERICAN' POVERTY.

Byline: David Kronke TV Critic

An exercise in perceptions: Throw white-trash hillbillies on ``Jerry Springer'' and it's considered exploitative fisticuffs. Present them in an HBO documentary directed by a scion of the Kennedy dynasty, however, and it's a sensitive evocation of a disappearing culture.

So it goes with Rory Kennedy's ``American Hollow,'' one in an ongoing series of documentaries of life in these United States in HBO's ``America Undercover'' series. This is one of those documentaries that isn't really about anything in particular; the cameras simply spend a year flitting like horseflies around 68-year-old Irie Bowling and her family - her husband, Bass, their 13 kids, 30 grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren. All but a son dwell in the remote Kentucky hills of Mudlick Hollow (at least the scenery is pretty), where they're uniformly underemployed and underengaged by life - quaffing beer seems to be as good as it gets 'round these parts. Nonetheless, Kennedy follows the clan around, hoping something compelling will happen.

And something does, sort of, eventually, but Kennedy never quite captures on film whatever it is about Irie and her kin that inspired her and that she thought might be instructive for the rest of the country. Likewise, it's unclear why we should be lamenting the inevitable passing of this backward culture, as this hard-scrabble brood clearly demonstrates that innocence and naivete aren't all they're cracked up to be.

There's Lanzo, one of Irie's sons, who drops pearls of wisdom like, ``If you can't help yourself, you can't help nobody - you ever think of that?'' and gets fidgety because his Prozac hasn't arrived from town. (Pep pills and ubiquitous satellite dishes are the main evidence that the 20th century has arrived in the Appalachians - otherwise, the Bowling homes seem what might be charitably called ramshackle.) Edgar, another son, is jailed under suspicion of breaking and entering; he's eventually released, but not before Bass sagely observes, ``Ain't no disgrace being put in jail, just staying there'' (many in the family seem to have a couple of drunk and disorderlies on their police record).

Daughter Samantha veers most uncomfortably into Springer territory, fleeing a violently abusive husband that the rest of the family can't seem to control. Then there's Clint, a high-school senior, who seems to comprehend that Mudlick life is a deadend, but finds it tough to summon up the courage to leave. He'd stay if his girlfriend Shirley would just agree to marry him - Shirley's an old maid by Appalachian standards; she notes that she has friends who got married in the seventh grade and were moms by age 12, though she allows, ``I do think that's kinda young.'' When Clint and Shirley go through one of their routine separations, however, Clint's own dark, misogynist side seeps through.

All of this is punctuated by brief, incongruously perky segments in which the family celebrates sundry holidays, accompanied by sprightly bluegrass music on the soundtrack. But Kennedy has unearthed too many unsettling facts about these hayseeds to convincingly portray them as carefree in these moments. Just as the Bowlings scour the hillsides for roots and moss that earns them meager dollars, ``American Hollow'' pans for the grit in this bucolic setting and discovers sobering yet unsurprising truths about a long-ago and far-away terrain where you wouldn't even want to visit, let alone live.

The facts

The show: ``American Hollow.''

What: Rory Kennedy's documentary in HBO's ``America Undercover'' series about the trials of an Appalachian family.

Where: HBO.

When: 8 p.m Monday; also Dec. 2 and 14.

Our rating: Two and one half stars.

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Photo

Photo: Rory Kennedy's HBO documentary, ``American Hollow,'' traces a year in the hardscrabble life of the Bowling family of Mudlick Hollow, Ky.

Steve Lehman/Associated Press