“Brave…courageous and powerful…Stevie doesn’t have the neat, almost poetic ending of Hoop Dreams, because sometimes life doesn’t turn out that way. The movie is deeply sorrowful and impossible to forget.”
—Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
“A gripping, startingly honest portrait…has all the heartstopping will-the-kid-make-it drama of Hoop Dreams.”
—Karen Durbin, New York Times
“Stevie, directed by Steve James of Hoop Dreams, was the finest documentary I saw at the Sundance Film Festival – a riveting small-scale epic…Stevie is the rare documentary that takes time to explore its own filmmaker’s exploitation of his subject.”
—Ty Burr, Boston Globe
(Four stars) “Filmmaker Steve James brings the same access, passion and skill to Stevie that he brought to 1994’s Hoop Dreams.” (The 5th best movie of 2003)
—Mike Clark, USA Today
“Stevie emerges painfully but profoundly as one of the most unusual, if not absolutely unique, efforts in the field of nonfiction filmmaking.”
—Andrew Sarris, The New York Observer
(Four stars) “Stevie portrays a remarkable gallery of real-life characters…It’s no accident that this movie is named after both the filmmaker and his subject. It stands with the most thoughtful releases of recent months, and will linger in memory.”
—David Sterritt, Christian Science Monitor
“[Stevie] is surely representative of all our lost and abandoned. …if James and his crew can spend years with these blighted souls, surely you can spend two hours with them, exploring compassion’s outer limits.”
—Richard Schickel, Time
(Four stars) Stevie…”At bottom it is a deeply humane and touching experience – as fine, a concerned and socially sensitive a documentary you’ll find… If there are parts of it that evoke the guilt and fear of the largely repressed issue of class inequity in America, no small part of its power stems from the fact that it works through those things to a state of genuine and unequivocal empathy for a badly damaged – and damaging – individual.”
—Geoff Pevere, Toronto Star
“A moving knockout of a documentary…Mr. James dares us to see [Stevie Fielding] as a human being without excusing him for his misdeeds. In the process, he paints a painfully vivid portrait of emotional bonds, responsibility and family in America. Stevie is one of those magical docs that makes you look at the world differently upon re-entering the hard light of day.”
—Chris Vognar, The Dallas Morning News
“Stevie is gripping in its intimacy.”
—Owen Gleiberman, Entertainment Weekly
“Steve James…has filmed this far more personal documentary, which has the dramatic urgency of the best fiction.”
—Stephen Farber, Movieline
In 1995, filmmaker Steve James returns to Pomona, a beautiful rural hamlet in Southern Illinois to reconnect with Stevie Fielding, for whom James once served as an advocate Big Brother. He finds that the once difficult, awkward child has become – ten years later – an angry and troubled young man. Part way through filming, Stevie is arrested and charged with a serious crime. He confesses to the crime and then later recants. The filmmaker himself is drawn into the film as he tries to sort out his own feelings, past and present, about Stevie and how to deal with him in the wake of his arrest. What was to be a modest profile of Stevie, turns into an intimate four and a half year chronicle of a dysfunctional family’s struggle to heal.
Stevie is a Kartemquin Films production in association with SenArt Films.