A Diary About Today’s America

Can a film illustrate complex issues with relatively cardboard characters and dialogue? That’s the conundrum of “Our America,” which received accolades at Sundance in January and premieres on Showtime Sunday at 8 p.m.

Based on a true story, the 95-minute movie focuses on LeAlan Jones and Lloyd Newman in Chicago’s South Side. After a 1993 audition, the teens were selected by producer David Isay to create a “diary” for National Public Radio.

Isay (Josh Charles) trains the strait-laced Jones (Roderick Pannell) and troubled Newman (Brandon Hammond) to use radio equipment. For one week the teens document their daily routine, from the gantlet of alcoholics and gangbangers they run on their way to school to the hardscrabble stories of friends and relatives.

The film shows how their effort, a candid project titled “Ghetto Life 101” that aired in November 1993, won awards but also drew critics who claimed that the African American boys were manipulated by their white producer.

“Our America” really could be two movies, with the first half dramatizing this experience. The second half follows Jones and Newman as they pursue the story behind a 1994 incident on their home turf, in which two young boys were convicted of first-degree murder. Their Peabody Award-winning report finds out what motivated the killers, while dissecting urban life’s woes.

The problem with director-cinematographer Ernest Dickerson’s film, with a teleplay by Gordon Rayfield based on the NPR trio’s book, is the woodenness of many of the characters as well as the script. The staginess offsets some of its grittiness. (A note to parents: Showtime has rated it TV-PG, though there are harsh expletives.)

Nevertheless, “Our America” will make you think twice the next time you hear a tragic story from “the bad part of town” that seems so far away but is actually quite close to home.