For Sister Helen Travis, the subject of the documentary Sister Helen, doing the work of the divine is a rough-and-tumble business, necessitating not only compassion and kindness, but also a marine's toughness and an ear for bullshit. An unlikely warrior in God's army, Travis found her calling late in life, following the deaths of her husband and two sons and her own struggles with alcoholism. With little more than private donations, an industrial amount of chutzpah, and the force of her personality, the enthusiastically profane nun ran a private shelter for alcoholics and drug addicts in the South Bronx, where she specialized in a brand of love so unrelentingly tough it sometimes bordered on cruelty. Sister Helen follows Travis around cinéma vérité-style as she goes about her daily work: doggedly looking for evidence that her charges have lapsed from sobriety, visiting her old stomping grounds, and returning to her family's graves. Travis is a mother figure to the lost souls who fill her shelter, but she's the kind of mother who inspires aggravation as well as adoration. She's a prototypically New York type of character, and she seems to delight in shattering people's conception of how a nun should act. Yet even as she fights a daily battle for the sobriety of the men in her shelter, her own health is rapidly failing, which lends poignancy and urgency to an already poignant, urgent film. An unforgettable tribute to a remarkable life, Sister Helen is inspirational in a way a film about a more conventionally pious religious figure could never be. Travis seems to be the antithesis of a cardboard saint: Her hard life and abundant flaws make her selflessness and devotion to the bruised and battered men who rely on her all the more remarkable. Through the earthiest of tactics, Sister Helen, and the film that shares her name, achieve a strange sort of grace.