The great documentary maker Steve James (Stevie, Hoop Dreams) returns to his hometown of Hampton, Virginia, to dredge up the story of a 1993 controversy involving NBA icon Allen Iverson. As a high school athlete in Hampton, Iverson was involved in a racially motivated brawl at a local bowling alley in which a white girl got hit with a chair; in order to charge him without any evidence that he’d thrown the chair, the prosecutor perversely invoked an old antilynching statute against “maiming by mob,” and Iverson wound up with a felony conviction and a five-year sentence (he was granted clemency by the black governor, Doug Wilder, after four months). The conflict still provokes great bitterness on both sides of Hampton’s racial divide, and almost no one comes off looking good; that includes James, who inserts some autobiographical soul-searching but never really explains what he hopes to accomplish by ripping off the scab after all these years. 80 min.
