MONTCLAIR, N.J. – Kenny Anderson is introduced to a crowd of moviegoers who have just watched his life story unfold in all its fits and foibles on the big screen. He strides over to join the film’s producer and director, Jill Campbell, smiling under a baseball cap pulled low enough to shield his eyes.

Soon he is talking about his mother, who was primarily his savior but in certain ways, he can admit, was also his saboteur.

The smile melts away into sobs.

“My mother meant the world to me,” he says, his voice breaking through the tears and the recollections of her demons with alcohol, drugs and men who didn’t stick around. “My only thing was to take care of her. I really didn’t have a Plan B.”

He is referring to how he conducted a basketball career that held the promise of professional greatness and by extension a life of surmounting the most daunting of socioeconomic odds. Nearly a quarter century ago, Joan Anderson sat in her living room in LeFrak City, a housing development in Queens in New York, and seemed, in retrospect, to be speaking from the future when she said, of the four children she raised alone, but mostly of the one who would earn tens of millions and spend it all, “I gave them life, but I couldn’t live it for them.”

She died in 2005, the same year Kenny Anderson retired from the NBA after 14 seasons and filed for bankruptcy after earning roughly $63 million.

The timing of it all sounds haunting, but, he says now, his tough New York City skin holding up to the years of piercing pain, “I don’t want no pity from nobody. My mother used to say, `You had eight kids? Did you have fun making them? You’re a knucklehead but take care of them.’ ”

How does he take care – or repair – a complicated life he can so casually call “a walking mistake?” How does he make sense of it all?

Four years ago, Anderson was approached by Campbell, a filmmaker and Long Islander with an appreciation for the game and for who he was, or had been. Once knighted by New York super-scout Tom Konchalski as “the greatest high school point guard” he’d ever seen, and selected by the New Jersey Nets with the No. 2 pick in the 1991 draft, Anderson had bottomed out with a DUI charge that cost him a coaching position at a private high school in Florida.

Anderson walks in his neighborhood in Pembroke Pines, Fla., in 2010. (Getty) More

The job had been a baby step back into basketball, or what he calls “the part of my life that was always easy.” Campbell found him at a point in which the rest of it was plagued by a nagging and even injurious lack of purpose.

With his mother gone, he was free to bare it all in living color, he said, and the result is a documentary, “Mr. Chibbs,” which premiered over the weekend at the Montclair Film Festival and will open Wednesday in Manhattan. The title is derived from the nickname his mother gave him as a toddler who became the precocious ball-handling wizard and first caught the eye of Kenny Smith, another prodigy of the LeFrak housing project, situated alongside the Long Island Expressway.

The takeaway revelations – the womanizing and wallet-draining eight children by five women, the substantiation of excessive drinking rumors that followed him throughout his career and even his molestation as a youth by two men – including a youth coach – are not news-breaking. Anderson has alluded to all of it in interviews during his years out of the game. But what amounts to a revisiting with the people and places of his past – including two sons in New Jersey he has had little contact with – makes for a raw, uncompromising 86 minutes.

Afterward, in the lobby outside the theater, Anderson chats with a few of the attendees, some of whom remember him well as the shifty and spindly Nets point guard who could make the ball dutifully obey the commands of his left hand, just a few miles east at a no-frills arena near the Lincoln Tunnel to Manhattan. Having heard him say on screen, “It’s difficult trying to figure out how to be selfless when you’ve been selfish your whole life,” they wish him well. Anderson walks away to greet a familiar reporter and to say that making the film, in his mind, is a start.

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