A tough look at addicts’ struggle

In 1998, filmmakers Rob Fruchtman and Rebecca Cammisa moved into the John Thomas Travis Center, a halfway house in the derelict and impoverished Mott Haven section of the South Bronx. They took with them a small digital video camera and spent 18 months shooting 200 hours of videotape.

They were richly rewarded for their dedication. The result is “Sister Helen,” a captivating portrait of the center’s salty founder and a number of her residents, who struggle with their addictions in order to remain in a drug-free environment. It opens a multi-weekend Southland run on Saturday and Sunday at the Sunset 5 as part of the Laemmle Theaters’ Spring Documentary Days series.

A recovering alcoholic herself, Sister Helen Travis became a Benedictine nun in 1986 after the drug and alcohol-related deaths of her husband and two sons. She opened Travis Center 12 years later in a recycled, five-story brick Victorian building that provides private rooms for 23 men. For Sister Helen, the center represents a second chance to make something of her life and to do for others what she was unable to do for her sons.

She is the embodiment of tough love, and the unsparing honesty that she demands of herself she also demands from her residents.

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Sister Helen is an earthy, street-smart, sometimes foul-mouthed saint, at times infuriatingly wrong-headed but ever shrewd and penetrating, and ultimately profoundly admirable and downright endearing.

In telling Sister Helen’s story, the filmmakers could not have scripted it with more suspense and surprise. Its full impact could not have been predicted by them, and the result is an unforgettable real-life drama that unfolds as we watch it

LACMA’s “Movie Crazy: The Best of Harold Lloyd” opens at 7:30 p.m. Friday with “Speedy,” a delightful 1928 comedy that casts Lloyd as a devil-may-care young New Yorker who cheerfully zips from one job to another. Directed by Ted Wilde, “Speedy” rambles about considerably but always amiably. The film is also a priceless record of the colorful street life and landmarks (several of them sadly gone) of New York at the time. Second feature is “Why Worry?” (1923), and both will be presented with live musical accompaniment. The Lloyd series concludes next weekend.

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Screenings

“Sister Helen,” Saturday and Sunday, 10 a.m., Laemmle Sunset 5, 8000 Sunset Blvd., West Hollywood. (323) 848-3500. Also March 29-30, 11 a.m., Monica 4-Plex, 1332 2nd St., Santa Monica, (310) 394-9741; April 5-6, Playhouse 7, 673 E. Colorado Blvd., Pasadena, (626) 844-6500; and April 12-13, Fallbrook 7, 6731 Fallbrook Ave., West Hills, (818) 340-8710.

“Speedy” and “Why Worry?”: Friday, 7:30 p.m., Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd., L.A. (323) 857-6010.