TV Reviews : THE NEW SEASON : ‘Sudie and Simpson’: Triumph Over Racism

Filmmakers have long fed on the richness of Southern literature, but seldom has a movie of the rural South captured the power of friendship and love as evocatively as “Sudie and Simpson” (on Lifetime cable tonight at 9, followed by repeat broadcasts Saturday at 6 p.m. and Monday night at 9).

Louis Gossett Jr. and Sara Gilbert (Darlene on “Roseanne”) play the entitled characters, an outcast black man and a spirited young white girl who together triumph over fear and racism in a small town in Georgia in 1943.

Directed by Joan Tewkesbury and adapted by Sara Flanigan and Ken Koser from Flanigan’s semi-autobiographical novel, “Sudie,” the production is atmospheric (catch that permanent wave machine in the beauty shop) and redolent of love and squalor.

There’s nothing soft at the core of this heartwarming story. A Gothic subplot of child molestation involving a white schoolteacher propels the emotional showdown, and the first image you see is a crude orange sign nailed up on a tree in the fictional town of Linlow: “Nigger--Don’t Let the Sun Set on You in Linlow.”

What’s so well captured is the personal point of view of a 12-year-old girl rebelling against the taboos in the narrow world around her. Gilbert is sensational, right down to her mastery of a Georgia dialect, and Gossett is memorable as a survivor hiding in a shack outside of town and tending his secret vegetable garden. Textured support comes from Frances Fisher’s staunch schoolteacher and an uncanny performance from newcomer Paige Danahy as Sudie’s chubby, dim-headed girlfriend.

Parents here have taught their kids to be terrified of blacks, and when Sudie, scampering in the woods, sees a black man in the flesh for the first time, her stunned reaction (and ultimate bravery) is a moment that catches your breath and casts writer Flanigan in the luminous path of such Southern writers as Harper Lee, Alice Walker and Carson McCullers.