It's one of those New York landmarks that some make a point of seeing and then feel disappointed about. For all the glamour associated with the Chelsea Hotel, the nearly 130-year-old red brick pile is really just a hotel well past its glory years -- if indeed glory years they were. The true history is only visible to those who put in time there. One could make the same argument about Abel Ferrara, the critically lauded director of more misfires than successes. His work can seem much less dangerous the more up-close it's viewed. So the fact that Ferrara's documentary about the Chelsea initially appears less than it's cracked up to be, but grows in stature the longer one lingers inside its cockeyed world, makes a strange kind of sense.

Chelsea on the Rocks is an invigorating piece of nonfiction filmmaking from a director who's traditionally been more comfortable juicing up genre flicks from gangster (King of New York) to vampire (The Addiction) with heated Catholic symbolism and other, less decipherable meanings. This isn't to say that Ferrara should consider a switch in formats, but this is a documentary with a kick. It both manages to take its (all-too-memorialized) subject not so seriously and yet treat it, and the people around and inside it, with utter respect.

The onetime abode of every kind of artist of a certain doomed stripe (Dylan Thomas, Sid Vicious, and Bob Dylan are a few of the "20th century immortals" invoked here), the Chelsea is fleetingly used in Ferrara's spotty stringing together of interviews with former and current residents as an example of a grungy New York that no longer exists. Ferrara (his raspy, excitable voice jabbing at the subjects from behind the camera) talks at length at first with many of those still living there, not bothering to put up title cards for identification purposes. He gets them going about whatever sort of batty thing they can remember resulting from cramming so many creative types together in substandard housing for so many years.

There's the woman who talks disconcertingly about all the "thuds" outside her window -- those would be the people who came to the Chelsea (she says) specifically for the purpose of killing themselves. There's some guy named Frankie in 921 who got taken down by a SWAT team just before 9/11. Stories abound about the jovial old manager Stanley Bard (since forced out in an ugly corporate dispute), who'd always give a struggling artist a hand. Then Milos Forman pops by to reminisce, cracking wise with that guttural bullhorn of a voice, and remembering the wild days when he lived there as a struggling filmmaker, rent-free of course. And everyone wants to talk about ghosts. Ferrara mixes it all up with ease, like he's been making documentaries all his life. He follows the better stories, lets the weaker ones lie, and connects it all with an ominous thrum of crackup and horror.

Given that Sam Shepard, Patti Smith, and Courtney Love all stayed there, the celebrity interview quotient could have been much higher. As it is, only the ones with a real reason to be on screen make the cut. Forman's time is worth its weight in gold, and Ethan Hawke (who moved in after his marriage to Uma Thurman collapsed -- Stanley offered him a room for free so he could get back together with her) makes a surprisingly engaging raconteur.

Being that this is Ferrara, one of the film world's least reliable or disciplined directors, the film as a whole is something less than perfectly formed. While his interviews come off surprisingly well and he maintains a low and pulsating hint of horror in the background. His most serious error is the decision to try and reenact scenes from the hotel's past, each time with wildly inappropriate actors. Model Jamie Burke creates one of the worst Sid Vicious impersonations on record, while the never believable Bijou Philips can't even make an impression as a shrieking Nancy Spungen. The Janis Joplin segment is even worse.

But what Ferrara is able to do in this often inscrutable but still fresh and surprising film is make a wonderfully convivial portrait of a building whose very essence seems to reek with danger and joy, at least before the corporate takeover. A good deal of that romantic aura is utter bull, of course, but it's slung by some of the finer practitioners around.



No showers here, either.