Just about any documentary about basketball is likely to suffer from comparisons to Hoop Dreams. But even if Soul In The Hole didn't exist in the shadow of one of the most successful documentaries of all time, it's still unlikely that the film will ever achieve huge crossover success. It's certainly a worthwhile movie, but it's too sprawling and ghetto-centric to appeal to a large mainstream audience. The film tells the story of Kenny Jones—the proud, rambunctious coach of Kenny's Kings, a street-basketball team—and his relationship with Ed "Booger" Smith, a basketball player whose brilliance on the court is matched only by his lack of control off it. Directed by British filmmaker Danielle Gardner, Soul In The Hole excels at capturing the loose, raucous energy of life on New York's streets, as well as the street-basketball league that serves as both a breeding ground for future college-basketball stars and a means of escaping, if only for a while, the strife and poverty of inner-city life. While some of his players might eventually make it to the NBA, basketball for Jones remains a pure labor of love, as he is sometimes forced to take on several jobs at a time to buy Gatorade and shoes for his players. Jones and his wife form a sort of surrogate family for Smith, and the film is as much about seeing whether Smith will escape the lure of the streets as it is about whether the Kenny Kings will win the Soul In The Hole tournament. But while Soul In The Hole is good at conveying the vitality and energy of street basketball, it can be as unfocused and out-of-control as the games it chronicles. But for anyone interested in either basketball or what it's like to grow up black and poor, Soul In The Hole is near-essential viewing.