Matt Ruskin’s “The Hip Hop Project” is less for the die-hard hip-hop fan than for those who know the genre only through billboards, music videos, and its role in the recent Don Imus debacle. It’s a movie for those gentlemen in business suits who were standing near a recent press screening and, upon hearing the name of the movie, rolled their eyes. “Hip-Hop?” they scoffed, “Sounds fun … “

In recent years, a handful of Hollywood heavyweights have quietly but passionately offered their depictions of rap and hip-hop to counter the popular misconceptions of the genre. Curtis Hanson’s masterful “8 Mile” (2002) showed rap as one man’s last-ditch effort to convert his life’s shortcomings into the lyrics that would be his salvation; Michel Gondry’s spirited “Dave Chapelle’s Block Party” (2005) reveled in a live Brooklyn concert featuring artists who eschew songs about bling and babes in favor of tackling bigotry and poverty.

Much like Messrs. Hanson and Gondry, Mr. Ruskin, in his debut documentary, sees the art form as a force of empowerment and a potential saving grace. For a younger generation, kicked to the gutter by a society that would rather spend time putting warnings on their music than helping them with housing, health insurance, and education, hip-hop is a means of speaking up.

The film takes its name from a CD called “The Hip-Hop Project,” a product of a New York City arts organization of the same name founded by Chris “Kazi” Rolle, who credits an arts organization called Art Start (founded by one of the film’s producers, Scott K. Rosenberg) with rescuing him from a life of theft and drugs on the streets of Crown Heights. The mission of his group is so simple that it risks seeming naive: As led by Mr. Rolle, the Hip-Hop Project offers inner-city youth the chance to perfect their hip-hop skills in a supportive setting of mentors and peers —they draft their own songs, write their own lyrics, and are even given studio time and guidance to hone their visions into a professional-grade product.

For the cynical, the whole enterprise may ring hollow: Delusions of grandeur rarely help inner-city kids through life. But as filmed — and, more important, edited — by Mr. Ruskin (who also serves as cinematographer), it’s not difficult to be convinced that this program does just that.

For starters, we see in Mr. Rolle’s backstory — orphaned young, abandoned on New York’s streets — a theme that is repeated among many of the children he mentors. The Hip-Hop Project is not just a place to come in the hope of mimicking MTV superstars. Mr. Rolle welcomes the children with a lecture that seeks to re-educate them about the genre, telling them that rap is about more than just vulgarity, drugs, money, and rage. He discusses the way rap music is less about showing off than a “conduit” for communicating. Imagine, he says, that everyone in the world was bobbing their heads along with your song — what would you have to say?

It turns out these kids have quite a lot to say. In one awe-inspiring scene, a crying teenage boy starts free-styling in the Hip Hop Project’s office, surrounded by his peers, improvising a song in which he confronts his father, who abandoned him. In another scene, a teenager sings about his mother, who suffers from multiple sclerosis and dies during the shooting of the film. Another teen sings about her abortion and the surreal sea of emotions that have threatened to capsize her life ever since.

As each child sets about writing and rewriting lyrics, practicing delivery and inevitably shedding tears, we bear witness to the rise of a most unlikely community down at the corner of West Broadway and Canal Street. Each day the kids show up despite the trauma at home (one copes with threats of eviction, another with the stress of failing his high-school courses) and learn how to lean on one another rather than compete.

Mr. Rolle recalls how rap music was the first artistic outlet to entice him to redirect his energy away from thieving and toward music, but, in a telling sequence, he acknowledges that he still has a lot to learn. As the kids work toward creating the first Hip-Hop Project album, Mr. Rolle seeks to reconcile with the mother who abandoned him as a toddler.

Apart from dreams of riches and record contracts, “The Hip Hop Project” fosters an appreciation for how hip-hop can elicit honesty and passion from these youngsters. Record companies may prefer to channel their voices into songs of greed, lust, and anger, but it’s clear there’s a world of Hip Hop Projects out there waiting to be founded — a chorus of different voices waiting for the chance to break through.