Director Spike Lee revisits New Orleans’ storm-ravaged Lower 9th Ward. When the Levees Broke, his four-hour commercial-free HBO movie about the devastation Katrina wreaked upon the city, airs tonight and tomorrow at 9.

SIPA Press / Charlie Varley

Phyllis Montana LeBlanc is among the angry residents of New Orleans who shared their Hurricane Katrina experiences with director Spike Lee for When the Levees Broke, a four-hour HBO movie airing tonight and tomorrow at 9 p.m.

HBO / David Lee

Anyone with even a slight case of “Katrina fatigue” won’t be finding any time for Spike Lee’s long, hard look at New Orleans’ worst of times.

Even those with an abiding interest might find their staying power sorely tested with HBO’s When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts ( tonight and tomorrow, 9 p.m.). Weighing in at four commercial-free hours, the director’s self-described “epic” takes a talking heads C-SPAN approach in reconstructing the near-destruction of the Crescent City.

Finger-pointing, much of it highly justified, has been a handful ever since. So have we really seen and heard it all as the Aug. 29th first anniversary approaches?

“Well, that’s the key,” Lee told TV critics last month. “People think they know, but they don’t know.”

He was abroad at the Venice Film Festival when Katrina first hit.

“I was watching these horrific images on the television in my room,” Lee said, “flipping back between BBC and CNN. And I was just really mad and sad . . . I said, ‘This is going to be a major moment in American history, and I want to do something about it.’ ”

At first he wanted two hours of HBO’s time. Then he asked for four. Granted. A happy medium — three hours — might have been a better, more effective course of action. When the Levees Broke has a number of affecting and/or provocative moments. But it’s an awfully long haul that could benefit from some shortcuts.

We get the basic points without having them hammered home again and again. But just in case you haven’t heard, FEMA keeps proving itself mightily inept. Many New Orleans residents still need a great deal of help. The levees remain a messy work in progress. And “George Bush doesn’t care about black people” is the ringing declaration of rapper Kanye West.

West’s famously unscripted broadside, delivered during a live, nationally televised Katrina benefit, is lauded in Act 3 as “blisteringly brilliant” by the voluble, show-boating Dr. Michael Eric Dyson, author of Come Hell or High Water.

Lee and his crew ended up interviewing almost 100 people for When the Levees Broke. New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin and Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco are among those who agreed to take part. Ex-FEMA director Michael Brown is not in the mix, although Bush’s famed head-pat — “Brownie, you’re doin’ a heckuva job” — is reprised three times in succession.

Nagin had the other famed declaration of that time, pleading in no uncertain terms for federal aid in a radio interview that quickly made its way around the world.

His interviewer, longtime WWL radio personality Garland Robinette, still gets emotional about the impact of Nagin’s words.

“That was the moment I think we started getting help,” he says before weeping and apologizing.

Nagin, recently reelected as mayor, still has a way with words. Raving about his first ride aboard Air Force One, he says, “I’ve never been on what I call a pimp mobile, man.”

Lesser-known New Orleans natives are far blunter. Notably profane in their denunciations of government foot-dragging are Cheryl Livaudais, who mostly talks with a beer in her hand, and Phyllis Montana LeBlanc, a razor-sharp critic of virtually everything that’s befallen her.

“When people are mad, they curse,” Lee said in last month’s interview session. “And I did not want to censor anything . . . We wanted to record the raw feelings of these people.”

The film effectively begins with Louis Armstrong’s timeless performance of “Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans?” Accompanying images range from past good times to a Humanity Street sign that’s barely keeping its head above swelling flood waters.

That’s what’s paramount in this overall picture — the humanity. It’s heartbreaking to see a weeping, elderly woman return to her lifelong New Orleans home with her son. She’s devastated by what’s become of its once well-ordered interior.

“The china closet don’t have no business being over here,” she says in disbelief. “It’s (supposed to be) in the den.”

Almost a year later, New Orleans as a whole is still a fragile china closet in danger of being decimated by any successor to Katrina. Lee’s film brings this all home in both personal and sometimes polemical terms. A crisper, leaner approach would have made him a better messenger, though.