As a still photographer and a filmmaker, Danny Lyon is drawn to the lives of America's loners, losers, outcasts. His camera records hard truths with a combination of distance and compassion that effects a rare sensibility. Lyon's subjects may be bikers, prison inmates, abandoned children, or tattoo artists, but by the end of the film, they are us. Willie concerns a young man, Willie Jaramillo, whom the New Mexico-based filmmaker has chronicled from childhood in his films Little Boy and Llanito, about small-town New Mexico life. (He was also the subject of the photographic exhibition, "Willie, We Weep for You.") At age 27, Willie is in and out of, but mostly in, the state penitentiary. Flashbacks of his youth are intercut with harrowing stories and images of life on "nut row," the only place authorities could find for the defiant boy whose m.o., and whose crime, is disturbing the peace. Interviews with prisoners, some on death row, make this a film of extreme realism, and this is its poetry as well.