Dreaming Walls — ethereal film documents New York’s fabled Chelsea Hotel

Exactly when does a bohemian bolt-hole transform into a brand name? The question strikes you watching Dreaming Walls, a slim, ethereal documentary portrait of New York’s fabled Chelsea Hotel. We open, naturally, with a spectral gallery of notable guests: a dying Dylan Thomas, Marilyn Monroe hiding from the flashbulbs, various Beat figures, the Warhol crowd. By the time Patti Smith is on a balcony in the early 1970s, the reputation is secure. “I’ve always wanted to be where the big guys were,” she tells a camera. 

But co-directors Maya Duverdier and Amélie van Elmbt now find the premises in another stage of life. The fame lives on, but the actual building is a mass of exposed wires and plastic sheeting, in the midst of wholesale renovation. (Filming took place in 2018-19; the hotel reopened last year.)

That early sequence is a rare glimpse of the stars. Otherwise, the history is left implicit, the assumption that if you’re here, you know that stuff already. You may find the decision at once admirable and frustrating. Instead, the movie is bound up with the hardy band of long-term residents still in situ during the construction work. Permanents, you might say, though the limits of the word become a theme.

Amid the angle grinders, the average age skews upward. The mood less so. Duverdier and van Elmbt capture much melancholy from these artists, dancers and non-specific foot soldiers of the counterculture, awaiting the absorption of their home into sleek, 21st-century Manhattan. The sense of a ghost story is self-evident. Like many examples of the form, the film sticks in the mind longer than you might expect.

★★★☆☆

In UK cinemas from January 20