In the early hours of June 28, 1969 at the Stonewall Inn, an assortment of dandies, dykes, drag queens and other queers reached their breaking point, and something finally snapped.  As the New York police stormed the squalid innards of the Greenwich Village bar, some two hundred Stonewall patrons opted not to cooperate with authorities, and a routine raid quickly escalated into a full-on revolt that spilled over into the streets and arguably provided the jump-start needed to energize a movement now forty years in the making.  The rest, you might say, is history.

That is the history Kate Davis and David Helibroner recite in their new film Stonewall Uprising, a dutifully chronicled and somewhat perfunctory document of the outburst widely touted as the breakthrough moment for the modern LGBT social movement.   The film, which is currently enjoying a limited run at Minneapolis’ Lagoon Cinema for the next week, is probably best-suited for those not terribly familiar with the movement’s history.  For bone fide Friends of Dorothy already familiar with the historic event, it might feel like little more than an 80-minute drive down the rutted Yellow Brick Road of queer history.

Most would argue that to fully appreciate the significance of the Stonewall Riots, it should be made clear just how bad things were for gays and lesbians in New York.  Uprising spends almost half its running time familiarizing the audience with a queer subculture then growing in the slums of New York City, amidst constant police interference, an unsympathetic local government and a national media climate hell-bent on protecting society’s vulnerable from the dangers of the homosexual.  With rather effective bluntness, Davis and Helibroner pepper their doc with numerous grainy public service announcement excerpts and reflective interviews to affirm just how difficult life could be for a New York homo circa 1969.  The service announcements – uniformly branding the homosexual as the precursor for society’s degradation – are played for the absurdist chuckles of an audience that presumably knows better, but once they become juxtaposed against interviews from spectators and participants of the Stonewall Riot who were forced to endure such a climate, the reality and frustration start to settle in.

Eventually the movie begins recounting the riot itself, which is delineated through occasionally riveting interviews and faux archive footage and photographs created exclusively for the documentary.  The dramatized material did not completely work for me, though I do not hold it entirely against the filmmakers for this; the Stonewall Riot notoriously lacks substantial visual media sources and, to their credit, the directors are upfront with their decision to employ this “new” footage.  Still, other great documentaries – namely 2008’s Oscar-winning Man on Wire – put this technique to great use, and Davis and Helibroner fail to give these sequences any sort of visual distinction.  Ironically the transitions between staged and genuine footage were distracting in their seamlessness.  The directing team ought to have stuck with their talking head interviews to convey their narrative – sometimes telling can be more effective than showing.

More importantly, though, Uprising fails to do more than provide an easily-digestible retelling of the night’s events that wouldn’t be out of place in a high school classroom or on the History Chanel. I doubt I would be making a radical claim if I asserted that the LGBTQ rights movement has progressed far enough that a more polemic take on the riots would prove both for a more interesting argument and more challenging filmmaking.  Few out there – including me – would question the near-mythical significance of Stonewall as part of this movement.  But like most myths, they warrant deconstructing.  When witness justified the use of violent force toward the end of the movie, they insist “Sometimes in history, there is a place for violence.”  That may very well be true, but that is exactly the kind of loaded statement this documentary might have explored.  There are other questions the directors could have delved into.  What were other LGBT activists throughout the country doing to shape the movement?  Why is Stonewall not considered worthy of inclusion in a standard-issue history textbook in schools? Forty years removed from the event, have we as a movement and a people begun to lose sight of what all those rioting queens ultimately gave us?  Disappointingly, none of these questions seem to be of any interest to the filmmakers.

Even with the many missed opportunities, one moment in Uprising made the movie worth my (well, my boyfriend’s) well-earned cash.  One of the interviewees, a raiding NYPD officer, recalling how rioters had his team pinned down.  His story is essential; as he recounts the dread he experienced at the hands of his drag-donned assailants, we finally get a sense of a very real anger conveyed by a group of people who had finally reached point break.  The officer, whose interview provides the movie’s final moment, also gives the doc its most profound display of retrospective wisdom.  Reflecting on the job he was obligated to carry out, he laments, “they were breaking the law…but what kind of law was that anyway?”