Alexandria Goddard in Roll Red Roll (Together Films)

 How do you cover up a heinous crime when you’ve tweeted and posted it all over social media? Nancy Schwartzman’s compelling and alarming documentary Roll Red Roll covers a sexual assault in the downtrodden Rust Belt community of Steubenville, Ohio. Along the way, it opens up contemporary issues: the relatively new practice of unwisely documenting actions on Twitter; conditions in left-behind, have-not America; and the early stirring of the #MeToo movement.

Perched on the banks of the Ohio River, Steubenville has a hard-bitten look to it, and Schwartzman’s cameras capture the desolation of its hilly streets. The town took solace in one pleasure, though: a tough local high school football team that drew cheering crowds every week as they rushed the field like gladiators.

However, one night in August 2012, Steubenville’s football stars raped an unconscious classmate during a series of drunken parties, posting gloating photos, tweets, and videos of it on every digital platform then available. Perhaps they believed they’d never be called to account for the rape. After all, the team was the town’s pride and joy, and the boys were sure their coach would protect them and that important townsfolk would downplay the accusations (they were right).

Except a crime blogger in California, Alexandria Goddard, happened to spot a perfunctory news item describing the rape accusations. Unsatisfied with the lack of detail on what sounded like a big scoop, she pursued the lead through social media, gathering and sharing masses of incriminating data. “The cell phones told the story,” as one local teacher puts it. In the film’s strongest section, the boys’ coarse social media posts, bared for viewers, arouses a sense of shock and voyeurism. So do police tapes of interrogations, where the suspects offer up evasions, lies, and self-contradictions to the patient detective in charge of the case.

Events moved fast. Goddard was harassed and sued for defamation as her reward for exposing unpleasant facts. The story went viral and drew attention all over the country and even parts of the world, angering townspeople who felt unfairly singled out. The case went to trial, where light sentences were handed down to only two of the perpetrators. The hacker group Anonymous got involved in the affair, leaking even more shocking video on the rape. Their sinister masks create a jarring note at a town rally where women speak out about sexual assaults that they have kept silent for years. Anonymous may have been on their way out, but #MeToo was just getting started.

Roll Red Roll builds tension with its sequence of different testimonies, denials, and fragments coming together in a disquieting story. Although the events are complex and the filmmakers could not include every detail, they leave us with the sense of justice not fully done. Perhaps never to be done.