When the government sticks to its story, whatever the price

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” Joan Didion famously wrote, and also to live with ourselves. And once we’ve signed on to a particular narrative, we tend to shape new information to fit it, because it’s easier to protect a wrong opinion than to admit a mistake. We can believe the whole world wrong if it doesn’t support the story we’re sticking to.

That as much as anything is the theme, intended or otherwise, of “The Trials of Darryl Hunt” (8 p.m. Thursday on HBO), a well-built, persuasive documentary film by Ricki Stern and Annie Sundberg about a North Carolina man incarcerated for almost 19 years for crimes -- rape and murder -- he didn’t commit. Yet, once investigators and prosecutors had settled on a story in which he had, nothing could shake them from it, however much evidence to the contrary was presented, and however much police or prosecutorial negligence or misconduct was revealed. Indeed, the misconduct was itself a matter of protecting the story, in which prosecutors put more faith than in the facts, and which a series of judges and juries were persuaded to believe as well.

It was not until the defense solved the case on its own that Hunt went free, and not even the real murderer’s confession was enough to free him immediately. (An in-depth review of the case by the Winston-Salem Journal had also built wide civic support.) And whether you want to take this as a tale of Southern racism -- Hunt is black and the victim, Deborah Sykes, was white, and the case divided the city along those lines -- or one of human laziness and misplaced stubbornness, it is certainly one of justice gone awry.

Stern and Sundberg began making their film 10 years ago when it seemed that Hunt, who maintained his innocence so steadfastly that he refused a plea bargain that would have let him off for time served, would finally go free on the basis of new DNA evidence. He didn’t, and the film has the unfortunate, poignant benefit of that extra decade as it follows its subjects through time. It is an advocate’s film, centered firmly on the astonishingly even-tempered Hunt, his supporters and friends. Yet it also gives his accusers their say and somehow does not demonize them; we see them merely as people telling themselves the stories they need to in order to live, to do their job, to get through the day.

*

robert.lloyd@latimes.com

*

‘The Trials of Darryl Hunt’

Where: HBO

When: 8 to 10 p.m. Thursday

Rating: TV-14 (may be unsuitable for children under the age of 14, with advisories for coarse language and adult content)