‘People have a right to their own opinion about what happened,” the attorney Douglas Dalton offers in Marina Zenovich’s excellent new documentary “Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired,” which makes its debut Monday at 9 p.m. on HBO. “But they don’t have a right to their own facts.”

To be sure, “Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired” is solidly anchored in facts. More important, it is a film whose real-life characters — from Mr. Dalton, who defended Polanski on charges that the Polish director drugged and raped a 13-year-old girl in Los Angeles in 1977, to Mr. Dalton’s counterpart in the Santa Monica District Attorney’s office, Roger Gunson, to Mr. Polanski, who fled America in 1978 prior to sentencing and is primarily represented in period news footage, to his now 45-year-old victim, Samantha Geimer, who made a public plea this week to have the 30-year-old case closed and who settled a confidential civil suit with Polanski more than 10 years ago — retell the story of the crime with unified intelligence and sensitivity. The irony is that of all those involved, it is Judge Laurence J. Rittenband, portrayed in the film as a legal demagogue who used the bench to pursue the spotlight rather than mete out the law, who is responsible for the undeniable fact that 30 years later, no one is happy with the outcome of Polanski’s prosecution.

“It’s too easy and a cliché to connect your work and your life in such a direct manner,” a British television journalist says in a recent, candid interview with the director included in the film. Nevertheless, Ms. Zenovich solidly links Mr. Polanski’s appalling childhood in Poland, where he was orphaned by the Nazis, as well as the random, brutal murder of wife Sharon Tate and their unborn child by Charles Manson’s followers in Los Angeles in 1969, to his genius for crisply mordant filmmaking and his compulsively sybaritic social life.

The fine distinction on display in “Wanted and Desired” is that which separates morality from honesty. Mr. Dalton, whom one journalist covering the Polanski case describes, arguably understatedly, as “Lincolnesque,” and Mr. Gunson, “the model of rectitude” according to the same journalist, are initially cast as opponents. But as the Polanski proceedings increasingly come to resemble a courtroom travesty in which the presiding rogue jurist bends the law at his ego’s behest, the two men grow similar in their resolve.

Both at work and at play, Judge Rittenband, in turn, bears more than a passing resemblance to Polanski. A physically diminutive lifelong bachelor with multiple girlfriends and a taste for champagne by the caseload, Rittenband (whom, it should be noted, died in 1994 and is not on hand to tell his side of the story) literally directed his court proceedings, rehearsing with defense attorneys and prosecutors in his chambers and choosing which reporters would best serve his agenda by occupying the limited seating available in the courtroom.

“Wanted and Desired” quite justifiably earned an editing award at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, and it was recently screened in a single remote theater in northern Manhattan and in Pasadena, Calif., in order to qualify for Oscar consideration prior to its cable premiere. If the Academy gave out statuettes for documentary clip research and clearances, the film would be a shoo-in for the top prize.

Ms. Zenovich maps the sordid and infuriating convolutions of criminal justice gone haywire with valedictory resourcefulness. Her use of on-screen transcript excerpts and vintage unedited television news coverage is frankly stunning. A sequence of quotes from Ms. Geimer’s initial complaint affidavit underscores the continuing humiliation and distress stemming from her singularly unpleasant trip to the casting couch. Mr. Dalton’s and Polanski’s constant efforts to remain civil under a barrage of boundaryless questions from reporters in courthouse halls, stairwells, and parking lots is similarly evocative and painful. An excerpt from a post-Manson trial press conference, in which Polanski tearfully decries the media’s “deliberate cruelty” for “lucrative purposes” with a child’s level of anguish, is simply heartbreaking, and poignantly supports a Polanski friend’s on-screen assertion that the director’s hellish youth denied him “the blueprint for life that others had.”

Above all, “Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired” is a sneakily trenchant film about a country in which journalism and popular culture have become hopelessly entangled, and a city where, as one Hollywood insider observes, “Everything is accessible.” The film’s ruthlessly lucid documentation of the egregious self-serving trial-by-media that occurred both when Polanski was the initial suspect in his wife’s murder and in 1977 suggests that celebrity journalism is a symptom of a shift from the postwar fatalism that Polanski so brilliantly depicts in his own work to the post-Watergate nihilism of a country sickly fixated on fame, sex, and revenge.