Regular folks, grand portrait gallery

Totaling four hours over two nights, Spike Lee’s “When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts” is a considerable thing -- a mural of sorts, protest art erected in ironic dismay over the governmental embarrassment and social disaster that New Orleans remains today.

Lee was at the Venice Film Festival when Hurricane Katrina hit on Aug. 29; he arrived in New Orleans with a film crew three months later, returning seven more times. By then, it’s clear, he had long since arrived at his conclusion: An act of nature had coupled with an act of bureaucratic criminal negligence to reveal how aspects of the slavery and Jim Crow eras remain.

It’s this levee, not the literal one, that Lee really means to explore. That the disaster revealed the still-ingrained inequalities for the country’s black underclass is hardly an unusual thesis; the live feed from the city’s predominantly African American Lower 9th Ward told us that.

The Lower 9th “became, in the aftermath of Katrina, a vortex of overwrought emotion and intemperate rhetoric, a stand-in for conflicting visions of the city’s future,” Dan Baum writes in the current issue of the New Yorker, in a piece subtitled: “Behind the failure to rebuild.”

Into this vortex steps Lee, whose last such project for HBO was the 1997 documentary “4 Little Girls,” about the 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Church in Birmingham, Ala., that became part of the fabric of the civil rights movement.

As a citizen journalist and witness to history, Lee in both projects is able to get his message about race across without coming off as didactic, something that has plagued him in the past as a filmmaker (see “Bamboozled”). I’d kind of given up on what Lee had to say about the world, much in the way that Woody Allen fans have given up on his movies -- a sense that the voice is only repeating itself now, hollowing out (while also attending Knicks games).

But “When the Levees Broke” is a reminder that Lee, like Allen, is at heart a natural-born comedian and keen conveyor of life as divine absurdity. Much of the footage and storytelling here is heart-rending, but it isn’t just: Lee’s eye and ear for street characters returns, the director-as-listener -- what enabled the late comedian Robin Harris, playing sidewalk pundit Sweet Dick Willie, to steal Lee’s 1989 film “Do the Right Thing.”

As such, “When the Levees Broke” is destined to resonate with more emotional truth than the determined mob of Katrina and Sept. 11 anniversary documentaries coming down the pike, every network in the land mulling what polite gift to give a hurricane on its first anniversary, terrorist attacks on their fifth.

Throughout, it seems to matter greatly that Lee is on the other side of the camera, as opposed to, I don’t know, NBC’s concern-exuding Brian Williams. It’s the best thing about this documentary, and the simplest -- the people who tell their stories to him.

“The insurance companies are ... there’s a special, special circle in hell for them,” says actor Wendell Pierce, before recounting how various flood and homeowners’ policies were somehow insufficient to fully cover the house his 80-year-old dad had bought after serving in World War II.

Lee doesn’t get the insurer’s point of view, and he stops just short of calling it all a vast conspiracy to rid New Orleans of its crime-plagued and lower-income areas as part of a broader Disney-fication of the city.

The implication’s there, of course. This isn’t a film about journalistic balance, it’s about being there so people can exhale. (“If they wanted us in New Orleans, they wouldn’t have tried to drown us and kill us,” says Audrey Mason of Gentilly. “I’m not going back there so they can finish it off.”)

Lee films many of his subjects in a chair, as portraiture. They’re deeply rooted folks -- politicians we came to know, newspapermen and musicians we didn’t, as well as a white couple, Betty and Charles McHale of Park Island, who, as it happened, were in Italy touring the ruins of Pompeii when Katrina made landfall.

It makes them all iconic. They talk, they cry, they sing, they riff. Lee’s still partial to the spoken word performance -- that montage in “Do the Right Thing” where his characters unleashed racial slurs at the camera. Only here, such as when Shelton “Shakespeare” Anderson does a rap in front of a cemetery, it doesn’t feel like a meta device.

In this way, “When the Levees Broke” isn’t so much investigative as impressionistic, the kind of storytelling you still get on a radio show like Ira Glass’ “This American Life.” It opens with Louis Armstrong’s “Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans?,” Lee juxtaposing imagery from New Orleans’ now-imperiled Creole-accented cultural history -- the eras that gave birth to the city’s artistic traditions and made it a tourist destination for white folks -- with scenes of the devastation and misery that threaten to wipe this off the map.

This is the value in the reporting Lee does -- the going back in and the teasing out of the deep cultural roots in the various communities and the way he and editor-producer Sam Pollard process the narrative of the disaster through a range of experiences.

Characters emerge, and you see why the film needed to be four hours.

We think we know William Freeman Jr. of Central City. He managed to evacuate his wheelchair-bound mother and get to the convention center, only to see her die there as they waited for a bus that came four days later (Freeman finally evacuated, deciding, wrenchingly, to leave her body there, a piece of paper as ID in her lap).

We think we know Phyllis Montana LeBlanc, formerly of Uptown, who takes to Lee’s camera like one of his Brooklyn characters, telling of the long walk to the airport, the 15-hour wait in sardine conditions, the terminals a makeshift shelter and triage unit. Finally able to board a plane, she recalls getting scrutinized by a black female security agent at the metal detectors. (“And I told her I don’t know who I am so when I whip your ass I’m not gonna know who you are either.”)

The stuff about the Army Corps of Engineers’ mistakes and the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s bureaucratic ineptitude are part of his story, but they have been examined more deeply elsewhere. Still, all your favorite Bush administration Katrina TV moments are here: the George W. flyover; the “heckuva job, Brownie” salute to then-FEMA Director Michael D. Brown; Condi shopping for Ferragamos; Kanye West going off-script at the telethon; Barbara Bush observing that evacuees had it pretty nice at the Houston Astrodome, given their lot in life; the president returning, 12 days later, to light up Jackson Square and give a speech.

And there’s bonus footage: Not only do we see Vice President Dick Cheney heckled (“Go [expletive] yourself, Mr. Cheney”) during his own photo-op in storm-ravaged Biloxi, Miss., but we also get the back story: The heckler, Dr. Ben Marble, an emergency room physician, had to take a detour to get back to cleaning up his destroyed house because Cheney and his entourage had cut off the main road.

Marble and his buddy shot the experience on home video, and Lee turns them into instant folk heroes (“When the Levees Broke” is a veritable ode to the power of the citizen filmmaker in times of crisis).

The outrage at times spills into agitprop -- cue the Rev. Al Sharpton; cue Michael Eric Dyson, author of “Come Hell or High Water: Hurricane Katrina and the Color of Disaster.” “They were treating them like slaves on the ship,” Dyson asserts about the chaotic evacuation after the Superdome debacle. “Families were being separated, children were being taken from their mothers and fathers.”

But it’s the accumulation of anecdote, not the rhetoric, that makes this such a valuable document. “When the Levees Broke” is like the New Orleans jazz funeral -- a dirge on the way to the cemetery, an up-tempo parade in the deceased’s honor on the bittersweet walk back home.

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‘When the Levees Broke’

Where: HBO

When: 9 to 11 tonight, Tuesday

Rating: TV-PG (may be unsuitable for young children)