This vision is what Andrew Douglas and the other creators of Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus had in mind. So they tailed Jim White around parts of Florida, Louisiana, Kentucky, and Virginia, in search of the romantic South. "The kinda places you want to read about, but certainly not visit," as White puts it.

The question is: Does this South exist outside of the stories?

It's not an entirely unsuccessful search. The narrative--which takes place mostly in a borrowed Chevy--is woven seamlessly with excellent musical interludes and interviews and quiet observation of rural Southerners. They visit Pentecostal churches, a "cut and shoot" bar, a born-again truck stop, a prison, and a coal-mining town. Periodically they "meet up" with musicians and author Harry Crews (all of whom are on the superb soundtrack) who perform in "romantic" settings--an old barbershop, an abandoned car, a shack in the middle of a lake.

Some of these segments are my favorite parts of the movie--Harry Crews is nothing less than large and riveting--but the blurring of these scripted scenes and the more extemporaneous ones (particularly in the churches and the bar) doesn't make for a very traditional documentary. It's more a pastiche of the real and not-real, a dreaminess, which is kind of a mirror of the musical heritage of the South that the makers of "Searching" were trying to track down. I enjoyed this theatricality, but it left me with a question: Since this documentary was originally made for the BBC, how would it come across to folks who've never visited the American South?

Many of the scenes are truthful and respectful: the Born Again truckstop, where a waitress tells the story of her son, who died at 15 ("He was headed in the wrong direction anyway. He's in a better place now."), and three sisters sing a traditional old-timey song; the elderly banjo player who reminisces about working in the coal mines. But I felt a certain uneasiness about the church service scenes, with closeups of people speaking in tongues and dancing ecstatically. And in another part, during a mountain religious radio broadcast, the camera trains closely on a woman with a profound craniofacial deformity. There's an uncomfortable element about this tactic, and it's the same thing that Shelby Lee Adams has been criticized for: Certainly these seemingly disturbing aspects of Southern life exist, but are they common enough to portray them as being typically Southern? "Searching" went looking for and found the romantic South, but this voyeurism subtly distorts reality and does a disservice to viewers who know nothing about the region or its people. Not everyone's an inbred holy roller.

Also? I wish it were longer. It clocked in at about 1:15.

This criticism aside, "Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus" is Jim White's vision, and it could be argued that his vision includes a lot of freakish people. It's certainly worth seeing for the music alone (although I could have done with a lot less Johnny Dowd) and, of course, for Harry Crews. "Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus" is a story about the South. And as Harry Crews said, "Stories are everything and everything is stories."