Artist Russell Craig, left, and Jesse Krimes in Art & Krimes by Krimes (MTV Documentary Films)

Art & Krimes by Krimes is an inspiring and infuriating documentary. Inspiring because, once again, we are reminded of the redeeming and life-affirming qualities inherent in creating art, and infuriating as a man falls into the prison industrial complex and the dehumanization that inevitably takes place there.

Jesse Krimes, now in his late 30s, recounts his childhood and how it affected him. Born to a teen mother, he didn’t have things that other kids had in his hometown of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, like television, his own room, or three-square meals a day. He never knew his father, but his mom’s boyfriend raised him, taking him and loving him as if Jesse were his own child. Unfortunately, he leaves Jesse’s live at 10, awash in alcohol, and kills himself six years later, leaving Jesse reeling and ripe for rebellion. He starts partying, gets kicked out of college, and starts dealing cocaine. He is self admittedly “out of control.” When the cops finally reach him, he does not resist and confesses his crime, but the police have a trick up their sleeve. Since he wouldn’t give up his dealers, they don’t just charge him with the cocaine he has in his home, but also add the amount that his friends said he sold them, thereby increasing his probable sentence. He eventually served five years total in a federal prison.

Krimes notices that the Black man he is sitting and chatting with in the holding cell before sentencing receives 20 years for the same crime. He is acutely aware of this disparity, and the film, directed by Alysa Nahmias, hammers this home. Krimes ends up meeting two artists in prison who become close friends, one Black and the other Puerto Rican, Jared Owens and Gilberto Rivera, respectively. He notes that in prison, each ethnicity sticks to their own, and there are usually rivalries and fights between them that the guards mostly ignore. This, he posits, is a way to keep the focus of their dissatisfaction on each other and not the system that brought them there. He makes the connection that one reason he receives attention is because he is White, and posits his friends are just as talented (from the work on display here, one can certainly agree).

What grounds the movie is Krimes’s general matter-of-factness and openness. For example, his son was born while he was locked up, and he refuses to put his son in the position he was in as a boy with an absent father. Befittingly, Nahmias films him in a straightforward, honest manner. There is nothing fancy here; she knows his story is compelling enough. The sequences where Krimes describes his incarceration are wonderfully animated by Molly Schwartz and capture the feeling of claustrophobia and helplessness that prison life brings.

We do get to know Krimes quite well and, again, his art is deserving of acclaim. Mostly, we come away with the fury of an unjust penal system meant to dehumanize and an admiration for the determination that overcomes that intention.