Stonewall Uprising - directed by Kate Davis and David Heilbroner - US - 2010

Opens Friday, June 18 at Cinema 21, 616 NW 21st Ave.

In 1969, in Greenwich Village, New York, a critical mass occurred in put-upon homosexual culture. A large chunk of New York's gay community violently fought back against the police and Mafia forces which had been controlling the city's unmentionable gay bars, and extorting and humiliating its denizens, for decades.

The "Stonewall uprising," as recounted to us by the cops, Village Voice reporters and bar patrons who were there, started as a "hell no" response to a police raid on the Stonewall Inn gay bar, where, say the interviewees of this doc, gays in New York had one of precious few places to feel safe. That response ballooned into a three-day riot of increasingly intense police manpower versus an equally charged and growing force of anti-establishment activists, not only homosexuals but Black Panthers, women's rights fighters and anyone else who felt sympathy for the cause. Once the dust settled, those who had been involved on the pro-gay side decided to stage a march through Manhattan, and thus took place the world's first Gay Pride Parade.

This is no doubt a worthy story of an important chapter in the civil rights movement, one that its participants, now in their '60's, still feel energized and awed by as they talk wide-eyed to the camera. But good information and passionate first-hand accounts are unfortunately not in service of a documentary that's particularly stirring or passionate itself. This is a low-key, by-the-numbers, talking-heads doc coming out in a time when something new, more urgent, is generally required to convince us that its subject was important enough to dedicate a film to. After 2008's similarly themed Milk, however, the road may already be paved. Given Milk's huge popularity in this city, it might not take much for Stonewall Uprising to find an audience. Its history is fine, its subjects worthwhile, but at 82 minutes it's hard to imagine that this incident and the legacy it left have been given their due.