Stuck in a hard place

Country Boys
As part of ‘‘Frontline’’
On: WGBH, Channel 2
Time: Tonight, Tuesday, and Wednesday, 9-11 p.m.

Robert Bly, the white-maned poet who was ridiculed in the early '90s for leading the men's movement into the woods with tom-toms, identified a sad and scary reality in the United States -- the absence of older men teaching young men how to be good men.

This gaping hole in our social fabric has been examined largely through the prism of urban America, and much has been documented about the crisis facing boys in cities who grow up without fathers or other male role models.

Rural America, by contrast, is terra incognita. We rarely run into textured looks at how country boys come of age, particularly amid rural poverty. Most of us settle for stereotypical images of monosyllabic youth, decaying cars, and swayback trailers. We simply don't know with any emotional depth what happens to the rural kids who are dealt a bad hand.

David Sutherland runs hard at the subject in ''Country Boys," his strong, heavily promoted documentary that runs for six hours over three evenings beginning tonight on WGBH. Expectations hover in the stratosphere after his acclaimed ''The Farmer's Wife" in 1998 about the travails of a Nebraska couple trying to hold on to their farm and marriage. Here, Sutherland follows the lives of two teenage boys in an Appalachian hamlet in eastern Kentucky from ages 15 to 18.

His effort is heroic and his access astonishing during the filming from 1999-2002. At its best, ''Country Boys" is compelling human drama, moving and unredeemingly sad. It provides the kind of rich, nuanced grasp of its characters more common to literature than television.

It must be said that it also can be tedious. If the program is very good at six hours, it would have been superb at five. The story line of one youth is manifestly more gripping than that of the other, and some of the ancillary figures are tiresome. Still, ''Country Boys" can hook you and haunt you with its unfiltered eye.

Sutherland grounds the program in raw visions. His camera wanders into squalor in the hollows of the area and along its train tracks. It lingers, a shade too often, on the passing freights, bleak landscapes, and ubiquitous religious highway signs like ''You need a cross better than Blue Cross" that shape the culture there. But then, these images are essential to remind us how different this world is from ours.

His two protagonists are utterly different. Cody Perkins is an orphan who lives with a step-grandmother in relative comfort. His mother committed suicide when he was 5 months old and his father later shot and killed his seventh wife before turning the gun on himself. He wears earrings and black nail polish and succumbs to a pair of nipple rings. He plays guitar in a band that produces blood-curdling noise, and he claims to be an ardent Christian.

Chris Johnson, a soft, conventional-looking kid, is trapped in a trailer with his alcoholic father, Randall, an emotionally vacant mother named Sheila, two siblings, and a grandmother. Sheila eventually moves out but, to make her car payments, still depends on the meager federal check Chris receives each month for his learning disorders. He can only receive it if he stays in school, which is a monumental challenge for him. ''My hundred percent is like 50 percent to most people," he says.

Both attend a small alternative high school for troubled teens. Cody goes out with Jessica Riddle, a vacuous girl whose parents provide him an added degree of stability in addition to what Liz, his rock of Gibraltar step-grandmother, gives. That said, the Riddles are a boring lot. Jessica's father, Ray, spends most of his time supine in a recliner, sleeping or engaging in desultory conversations. His presence is leavened by his simple songwriting and guitar playing, which can be charming.

It is Chris whose clumsy efforts to succeed captures us early. He enjoys none of the security available to Cody and suffers for it. He struggles at school and drops out to take one job at a Taco Bell and then another delivering pizza. He loses this when his car gives out.

Chris's boundless verbal patter masks a terror born of isolation from anyone who can aid him other than helpful teachers. No kid should be stuck in his circumstances. He occasionally slides into self-pity but generally maintains a game attitude toward life under ghastly conditions.

The fork in the road for Cody and Chris, when it comes, is merciless. Cody graduates from school, valedictorian, no less, secure with a girlfriend and plans to attend a technical college. Chris finally earns a GED and graduates from the same school but then falls through the cracks. He fails a competency test that prevents him from attending a nearby college, and then the family trailer is repossessed. He disappears with his grandmother in a U-Haul headed for Florida in search of his mother.

Since he completed filming, Sutherland has been bombarded with questions about what happened to the pair, so he has added a brief update at the end of the program. Cody's life proceeds along on a comfortable trajectory toward stability and independence while Chris spirals further down into the rural squalor he was so desperately aching to quit.

Sutherland, who wrote, produced, and directed ''Country Boys," has given us another unsparing look at the hardness of this American life. He reminds us here in brutal detail that country boys, like city boys, need all the help they can get to become men.

Sam Allis can be reached at allis@globe.com.