The documentary film "Capturing the Friedmans" won the Best American documentary prize at the Sundance Film Festival this year, which might imply that it is a true story.

It is described by critics as a brilliant movie that raises questions, in particular, about a child sex abuse case in Great Neck and, by extension, about the reliability of child sex abuse prosecutions in general.

The questions in particular are these: Did police and a hysterical public railroad an award-winning science teacher named Arnold Friedman, then 56, and his 19-year-old son, Jesse, into pleading guilty to things they didn't do - namely, sexually molesting dozens of boys during private computer classes in the Friedmans' home in the 1980s?

Could dozens of boys, age 7 to 11, suffer sodomizing episodes in front of each other without any of them ever telling their parents?

Is America in the midst of a hysterical overreaction to the perceived threat from pederasts?

Though many witnesses are brought to suggest that the police overreached in prosecuting the Friedmans, there are no simple answers offered in this movie.

And it is probably not fair to describe it only in terms of these policy questions. It is a good film.

It is as much about the peculiar Friedman family - Arnold and his wife, Elaine, and their sons David, Seth and Jesse - as it is about any "issues" at all. In producing this work, the filmmaker, Andrew Jarecki, mines a motherlode of home movies and video made by the weirdly narcissistic Friedmans themselves before and after the arrest of the father and son. And what he produces is a fascinating document.

I liked it, honest. And I don't wish to take any artist to task for having insights that jar or even anger me. That is what artists do.

But take this as a friendly caution if you should decide to see this movie: "Capturing the Friedmans" is a "documentary" only in the sense that real people appear in it and talk without scripts.

There are too many omissions, however, for it to fairly answer any of the particular or general questions it purports to ask.

It leaves out, for instance, any mention of a co-defendant of Arnold and Jesse Friedman - an 18-year-old friend of Jesse's named Ross Goldstein, who pleaded guilty to participating in the sex abuse of the boys and received a sentence of 2 to 6 years in exchange for his cooperation.

In a recent interview with Newsday's Víctor Manuel Ramos, the filmmaker Jarecki said he did not mention Goldstein in the film because Goldstein asked not to be mentioned.

Excuse me?

How does one make a film raising questions about the guilt of two defendants in a criminal case - and just leave out mention of the existence of a third?

Goldstein, the third defendant, said he was there in the Friedmans' computer classes, said he saw the sex crimes against the children, was able to identify the victims from photographs shown to him by police and was willing to testify against the Friedmans in court. A documentarian can question such a person's credibility if he so chooses.

But the film leaves him out, and lets Jesse vent his frustration - over and over - at being emotionally strong-armed into accepting a guilty plea by the prosecutor, and by his mother, who was afraid he'd receive a harsher sentence if he went to trial and was convicted. The fact there was an adult witness ready to testify against Jesse is never mentioned or alluded to. This is bad documentary journalism, at best.

Also bad, if you followed this story in the local newspapers at the time, is the way the film deals with Jesse's allegation that he was molested as a child by his father. It comes up because Jesse's lawyer, Peter Panaro of Massapequa, mentions it as a mitigating circumstance.

Yet, in the film, Jesse repeatedly insists that the case against him and his father was made up from whole cloth - and that the claim of abuse by his father was just a lie he made up to win sympathy.

That seems believable in the film. But it might have been less believable if Jarecki had included the Geraldo Rivera interview in which Jesse sobs and says he was molested by his father for years. That was pretty believable, too; but Jarecki told Newsday he couldn't get a release to use that tape. Whatever.

"I don't long to be free," Jesse said in a 1989 prison interview with Newsday reporter Alvin Bessent. "I don't miss my old life." In his old life, Jesse told Bessent: "When he was 8 or 9 years old, he stumbled upon his father's cache of kiddie porn. Later, his father began to visit his bedroom at night and fondle him. The abuse escalated into sodomy.

"'In my family, everything got washed under the rug. I never told about the abuse. I didn't think anyone would understand. Trying to do something about the problems in my family never seemed to get me anywhere ... But I, too, am a victim,' Jesse said."

No mention is made in the film of the pre-sentencing psychiatric report in which Jesse told a psychiatrist that he was relieved when his father began molesting the children in his computer classes because it finally deflected his father's sexual attentions from him.

Maybe it was all a lie then, of course. And maybe Jesse Friedman lies in his statements in the film, "Capturing the Friedmans." Certainly, Arnold Friedman lies over and over by omission; he is a strange presence throughout the home videos shot by his sons, participating with jokes and poses but never once addressing the question on everyone's mind: Did you do it, Dad?

His most eloquent moment occurs during an all-out fight between Elaine, his wife, and the boys, who support him unwaveringly.

"Shhhhhhh," he says. "Shhhhhhh ... This is getting out of hand."

Filmmakers and artists put things in and leave things out all the time. Discrimination is the essence of art, but there are moments in this fine film where a reporter can't help but feel that the artist is playing a little too loose with the facts.

You wouldn't care that much except for the kids, the Friedmans' victims, who are implicitly victimized again.