Dean Brudnick's Wetlands Preserved: The Story of an Activist Rock Club, showing today as part of the Rhode Island International Film Festival, is an exhaustive documentary look at a Manhattan nightclub that tried to combine rock music with political activism.

This is one of those "you-had-to-be-there" movies that will be of most interest to people who remember the Wetlands Preserve club, because much of it concentrates on the behind-the-scenes players. It focuses mainly on Larry Bloch, who started it in 1989 on what seems to have been a whim and an infusion of cash from his reluctant father, and Peter Shapiro, who bought it in the late '90s. Shapiro rode the club out to its closing. Its final shows were scheduled for Sept. 14 and 15, 2001, because of neighborhood gentrification and a crackdown on late-night clubbing by Mayor Rudolph Giuliani. But they never happened because its Tribeca neighborhood became a virtual ghost town after Sept. 11.

Bloch's plans were to make a place where, besides good music, the seeds of social activism could be planted. It seems from Brudnick's documentary that it was a pie-in-the-sky dream that was only marginally successful. While sometimes the club brought in many hundreds more than its legal capacity of 389, meetings of political activists attracted only small numbers.

Wetlands Preserve became known as a place for the "psychedelic jam band scene" and attracted Deadheads although, oddly enough, their iconic Grateful Dead never played the place. Instead there were such then-rising stars as Dave Matthews, Ani DiFranco, Phish, Pearl Jam, Blues Traveler, Spin Doctors and many more. Some of these performers are interviewed on camera.

Sadly, however, because there was very little footage shot of performances inside the club, Wetlands Preserved must content itself with snippets of a few shows and a musical soundtrack of songs that were once played there accompanying photographs of the performers in action. Consequently, despite being a film about a groundbreaking rock club, there's precious little music.

Instead, much of the film becomes a talking heads affair. Unfortunately, Bloch is not a very magnetic personality and there is lots of dull babble about such things as whether to use plastic straws for drinks or paper ones, which fell apart and which no one liked though they were Earth-friendly. Anecdotes from the performers, including Matthews, take us back to how it once was. But unless you had actually been there yourself, Wetlands Preserved gets tiresome pretty quickly.

mjanuson@projo.com / (401) 277-7276

Wetlands Preserved: The Story of an Activist Rock Club will play at 6:45 p.m. today at the Columbus Theatre, 270 Broadway, Providence, as part of the Rhode Island International Film Festival.