Contessa Gayles views James Jacobs’ life, imprisonment and dreams of freedom through a music-video lens in this SXSW-premiering documentary.

As robust as streaming, premium cable and PBS have made the documentary marketplace in recent years, you wouldn’t be wrong to feel that there’s a glut of similar stories being told in similar ways. If you’re a documentary about anything cult-related, good luck cutting through an ample amount of clutter.

Contessa Gayles’ new documentary Songs From the Hole, getting its premiere at SXSW, has a narrative that, conveyed as a dry logline, could be one of any of dozens of documentaries that play the festival circuit before reaching a soul-calloused audience.

The film — “documentary” doesn’t feel exactly right, though that’s what this is — introduces viewers to the life and music of James “JJ’88” Jacobs, who also serves as co-writer along with Gayles.

In April 2004, when he was 15, James killed a man. Just three days later, James’ brother Victor was murdered. The two events weren’t directly connected, but they were connected in the tapestry of the neighborhood in which the people concerned lived and the families that were torn apart. James spent his next birthday in prison, followed by the next 18 years. He experienced depression. He spent time in solitary confinement. He encountered the man who killed his brother. He dealt with his own crime and, at some point, he began to write songs as a way of addressing the young man he left behind and the adult he’d become.

Gayles tells James’ story with a foundation of traditional documentary elements, including interviews with James’ father, mother and sister, as well as his fiancée, and conversations/confessions/recollections from James delivered with the tinny audio of a prison telephone system. Most of the film, though, is built around the more polished and heavily produced songs — richie reseda is a producer of the music and a producer on the film — that run the gamut of self-directed anger, harrowing recollection and lyrical meditation.

Instead, JJ’88 is really good. His wordplay is exceptional and the songs are varied and catchy. If you aren’t careful, there could be a real confusion of the medium and the message at work here. James’ humanity isn’t validated by the quality of his music, nor is his music validated by the quality of Gayles’ filmmaking, which uses the songs as a far-better-than-average approach to the sort of re-enactments that are a big part of any conventional documentary fatigue. Most of the videos share a dreamlike quality that effectively matches the lyrics and contrasts with James’ direct circumstances.

I frequently found myself comparing the tone here to the short-lived, sometimes spectacular drama David Makes Man, which walked a similar line between romanticizing and eviscerating memory. Sometimes the aspects of James’ story are crushing, while the songs let the sentiments soar.

The film occasionally struggles to affirm its own messaging. It’s revelatory for James and his family to be simultaneously experiencing victimizing and victimization, but I watched the documentary several days ago and I’ve gone back and forth on whether the choice to largely exclude specifics about James’ victim is an act of dehumanization or one of compassion, sparing that victim from being reduced to a supporting character in somebody else’s narrative.