BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU.

Byline: Bob Strauss Film Critic

IN HIS WIDELY praised ``Hoop Dreams,'' documentary maker Steve James followed the fortunes of two gifted young basketball players while intimately charting the self-destructing tendencies of their underclass families.

With his new film, ``Stevie,'' the director really gets personal.

Stevie Fielding, a troubled youth from a rural district of Southern Illinois, was James' Little Brother when the future filmmaker attended college in the vicinity. Largely at the urging of then-girlfriend/now-wife Judy, James reluctantly became a Big Brother mentor to the troublesome 11-year-old - already a victim of multiple abandonments, sexual and physical abuses, and Ritalin-treated behavior problems. Then, upon graduation, James excused himself, with relief, from Stevie's life.

Driven by a sense of remorse, James revisited Stevie a decade later. Not surprisingly, he found a rage-filled, self-pitying, unproductive and not very bright young man. Stevie was more-or-less pleased to see one of the few positive role models he'd ever known again. James felt good about it, too, and perhaps as some kind of atonement decided to make Stevie the subject of his next movie.

Then Stevie was arrested for molesting his 8-year-old cousin. And the filmmaker thought he had ethical conflicts before.

All of which makes ``Stevie'' a remarkably discomfitting movie. Its humanistic achievements are substantial, no mistake about that. Rarely has a behavioral monster been granted such sympathy, compassion and explication. The film goes a long way, sometimes to a fault, to prove that every life is worth examining, no matter how dumb or degraded its particulars.

And then there's the whole, wormy question of what James is doing here. Though he clearly wants to help Stevie, he won't cough up the $100 to bail him out of jail (Judy, now a social worker who deals with sexual predators, won't let him). Is his constant cinematic prying into the follies of the unsophisticated Fieldings more exploitation than documentary inquiry? Should he even be making a film about the boy he abandoned, and making so much of his own unresolved feelings about that?

While these and similar questions make ``Stevie'' morally hard to tolerate, they also make it an extremely interesting work of ethical complexity. Whether he got it fairly or not, James repeatedly captures indelible footage. Stevie's traumatized but commonsensical sister Brenda and his learning-impaired fiancee Tonya are beacons of real hope in what looks like an unbeatably bad environment. And Stevie's accusatory relationship with his distant mother, Bernice, is a reality TV series all its own.

So ``Stevie's'' questionable aspects also make for its strengths. It's a uniquely personal form of documentary-making that James is exploring. I just hope he never trains his camera on me.

STEVIE - Three stars

(Not rated: language, drug use, children in jeopardy)

Director: Steve James.

Running time: 2 hr. 20 min.

Playing: Town Center 5, Encino; Playhouse 7, Pasadena; Sunset 5, West Hollywood; Westside Pavilion, West L.A.; University 6, Irvine.

In a nutshell: Director reconnects with the troubled young man he mentored, only to find him charged with molesting a young girl. A long and thorough movie offering multiple degrees of unease.