Merle Lister dancing with a construction worker in Dreaming Walls: Inside the Chelsea Hotel (Magnolia Pictures)

Dreaming Walls: Inside the Chelsea Hotel sets itself up as a ghost story. The camera roams smoothly and silently through the celebrated Manhattan hotel’s halls, eerily reminiscent of the famous Steadicam shots in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. Archival footage and films of former residents (Marilyn Monroe, Andy Warhol’s Chelsea Girls) are projected on a brick wall, accompanied by snippets of dialogue from former guests, such as Allen Ginsberg and Patti Smith. Finally, a host of elderly tenants work their way through the hotel, which has been under renovation for nearly a decade. (It reopened in March 2022.)

At first, it seems directors Maya Duverdier and Amélie van Elmbt are positing that the tenants are dispirited remnants and as wispy as the ghosts that one construction worker insists reside at the hotel. But as we delve in the lives of these denizens, we discover how vibrantly alive they are and how strong their will is to maintain the creative spirit of the Chelsea, home for countless artists since it was built in the 1880s.

The documentary focuses on a few of the holdouts who have not taken money to leave as the building transforms into a luxury hotel. Artist Susan Kleinsinger has been there since the 1970s, and once created a garden on the rooftop, but she has lost that apartment and has moved to the first floor with her partner, Joe Corey. There is Zoe and Nicholas, who spend most of their screen time loudly lamenting that the more bohemian residents are deliberately slowing down construction and depriving them of peace because of the noise.

But the film mostly centers around Merle Lister, an octogenarian choreographer who restlessly roams the wall with her walker, gently interrogating those around her, occasionally stepping away from her walker to stretch, exercise, and occasionally dance. She appears just at home among the drop sheets, wooden planks, and scaffolding as she was in the arty squalor of the past. She is, like the hotel, a testament of survival in a changing world.

The film is not about the past, though it’s suffused with the city’s cultural history and constantly references and compares it to the current state of the Chelsea. It feels more like a tone poem that is quiet and mesmerizing and ever so slightly diffuse. There is a sense of both time and timelessness as it toggles back and forth between the younger and older versions of many of the residents, which corresponds with the dreamlike tone.

Ultimately, Dreaming Walls is also about the multiple deaths, rebirths, and changes New York City itself goes through. Formerly, the Chelsea fit snugly in its bohemian neighborhood, but the New York it represented is mostly gone. But, like the hotel, the city is full of wispy ghosts whispering in your ear and tenants who live and occasionally thrive while the clangs and bangs of construction surround them.

Bohemians and artist and strivers and survivors of all sorts will find something deeply instructive in Dreaming Walls.