When Oscar-nominated writer and director Debra Granik visited Missouri to scout locations for "Winter’s Bone," she visited a local church for a service. As she sat in the pew, she took notice of a burly, hairy biker sitting near her. Taking notice of his Vietnam War tattoo that’s imprinted onto his arm, she elicited a conversation. The rest is history.

This man, Ron "Stray Dog" Hall, is a veteran who’s far gentler than as he appears, but he’s also a wrecked soul. After they’ve met, Granik gave Ron a minor role in "Winter’s Bone," and later returned to rural Missouri to record Ron in his natural habitat for the documentary "Stray Dog," which made its Milwaukee premiere on Sept. 27 at the Oriental as part of the Milwaukee Film Festival.

You may immediately make assumptions about Ron from the opening scenes of the film. After all, Hall is a 60-something biker who’s first seen hanging around his fellow biker buddies chain-smoking and sipping on a bit of moonshine. Some may think from first glance that he’s just a dimwitted hick, but that’s far away from the truth … very, very far.

Yes, he wears leather. Yes, he rides a motorcycle. Yes, he owns guns. Yes, he lives in a motor home community. However, Hall takes those judgmental assumptions and tosses them out of the window pretty quickly and often. His eyes fill with tears as he talks to his therapist, he takes an online Spanish course to communicate with his Mexican wife Alicia and he travels to strangers’ military funerals.

Granik details these events in every way possible and candidly captures Hall acting like himself on camera, the way that she knows him. In "Stray Dog," Hall has the free reigns to do what he wants and Granik and crew are just there observing as if they’re flies on the wall. The result is a fascinating humanist portrait of not only Hall, but also a rural culture that’s often left ignored; a biker culture that extends as Ron’s figurative family. After all, it’s a culture that Ron needs and it’s a culture that needs Ron and others like him.

The biker community is just one community that he’s a part of. Making ends meet as a manager at the At Ease RV Park, he oversees and takes care of his residents alongside Alicia, whose English is often muddled. Their conversations are often blanketed with amusing Spanglish, serving as a mishmash of two cultures crisscrossing underneath one roof. Their relationship is loving and sweet, however.

In addition to frequent visits to strangers’ military funerals and counseling sessions with other veterans, Hall and his loving wife Alicia takes part in a cross-country motor-cycle ride to the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington D.C. After suffering through two tours in Vietnam, the haunting memories of combat have imprinted his conscious like the tattoo that has been imprinted onto his arm. 40 years later, he experiences chronic nightmares and becomes visibly emotional when discussing the subject.

Despite the pain and guilt he goes through, his compassion and goodness seeps through his gentle and warm personality throughout the documentary. This goodness must be radiating as fellow veterans, residents at the RV community and his biker friends seem to have massive respect for him as a man, a man in which is seen is selfless and honest.

His goodness comes through the small gesture of taking one of his resident’s in the RV park to the dentist office for a check-up and large gestures such as offering to repair the home of a woman whose daughter was killed in Afghanistan. You get the feeling that one of the reasons why Hall offers his helping hand or offers advice to anyone who needs it may serve as a coping mechanism for his own problems. That’s never revealed; but I’d like to think that.

Employing an observational, fly-on-the-wall approach -- which excludes interviews, archival footage and voiceover -- Granik builds the narrative through letting the camera roll and capturing Hall’s life, which slowly reveals itself more thoroughly along the way. As the documentary moves along, Granik reveals more and more about Hall, surprising things such as the fact that Alicia isn’t his first wife. He, in fact, married a Korean woman whom he met while he was enlisted. Granik also observes his relationship with his daughter and grandchild.

It’s surely an interesting way to unfold a documentary like this, but it does slog and the pace slows with the arrival of Alicia’s 19-year-old twin sons who come to America, Jesus and Angel. Before their arrival, the poverty of the community was always in the background, never a blatant issue. It just kind of lingers.

Jesus and Angel, two well-dressed boys from Mexico City, experience a bit of culture shock as they come to realize that this rural area in Missouri is nothing like what they had expected, especially in America, the so-called "Land of Opportunity." Although this section of the documentary was undoubtedly interesting, it took us away from the main subject: Hall himself and it ultimately felt as an unneeded add-on.

Despite losing its pace near the end, "Stray Dog" is a fascinating documentary and quite an accomplishment for Granik, who goes beyond making just a simple portrait of an ordinary man, because Hall is just the opposite. His hairy, tough exterior is only the shell of his sensitivity and big heart.

"Stray Dog": *** 1/2

"Stray Dog" plays one more time at the Milwaukee Film Festival on Monday, Sept. 29 at 4:15 p.m. at the Times Cinema.