‘Mineshaft: The Cruising Murders’ Review: Compelling Documentary Probes the Legacy of William Friedkin’s Infamous Queer…

The legacy of William Friedkin’s 1980 erotic thriller “Cruising” is a complex one. A film long vehemently denounced by the queer community it purported to represent, and more recently reclaimed as a rare mainstream portrait of a vanished social scene, it is many things to many people — and in disentangling its onscreen achievements and errors in judgment from its heated production history, “Mineshaft: The Cruising Murders” already has a lot to do. But Jeffrey Schwarz’s engaging, impassioned documentary takes on plenty else besides, delving not just into the film but the climate of 1970s LGBTQ liberation, persecution and panic that enabled it, as well the horrific real-life murders that specifically inspired Friedkin’s script.

That can sometimes feel a shade too much for a film that glides by in a tight, gripping 85 minutes, buoyed by a lively, knowledgable ensemble of talking heads who variously contribute astute analysis, affecting personal investment and anecdotal spice to the subject. But the gear shifts here between pop-culture study and true-crime tragedy can sometimes feel abrupt and even a little jarring: “Mineshaft’s” bifocal portrait of a fraught turning point in American gay life wouldn’t be any less fascinating on a slightly larger canvas. Regardless, this Tribeca premiere is sure to be a hit with LGBTQ-oriented festival programmers, distributors and/or specialist streamers, abetted by Schwarz’s reputation as a chronicler of queer art through such previous films as “I Am Divine” and “Tab Hunter Confidential.” In a theatrical environment, it’s veritably designed for animated post-screening Q&As, not to mention double-billing opportunities with Friedkin’s original film.

A serial-killer mystery unfolding amid the sensual thrills and supposed risks of New York City’s leather BDSM scene, “Cruising” managed to engender controversy across the social spectrum: For conservative straight audiences, its centering of a erotic queer subculture was an outrage, while to many members of that subculture, the film was a demeaning misrepresentation. But for a generation of gay men not already in that world, as cultural commentator Dan Savage points out in an introductory interview, “Cruising” was an enticing window into kinks and desires that had never previously been depicted in popular media: However flawed, and heavily inaccurate, it minted countless leather-daddy fantasies.

Queer critics like the Village Voice’s Arthur Bell, meanwhile, resented a straight filmmaker claiming that milestone — accusing Friedkin, the thrill-chasing director of “The French Connection” and “The Exorcist” (as well as an adaptation of “The Boys in the Band” likewise unpopular with the gay community) of applying a stigmatizing straight gaze to the leather scene, presenting it as sordid and dangerous. Though Friedkin reasonably defended his artistic interest in the material — claiming not to make films “for or against anything” — it’s easy to see why gay men already being persecuted as deviants by influential homophobes like Anita Bryant were loath to embrace a lurid and rather bleak portrayal of their sexual liberation. As one talking head puts it: “The film shows gays as evil killers — how about the evil of the people that kill us?”

On that front, Schwarz digs into a wave of brutal, mostly unsolved murders on the leather scene in the mid-to-late 1970s that provided the basis for the climate of terror depicted in “Cruising” — focusing in particular on the death of Variety film writer Addison Verrill at the hands of fellow gay man Paul Bateson, a mentally ill X-ray technician who, as wild coincidence would have it, played a bit part in “The Exorcist.” There’s nothing either salacious or particularly revelatory to be drawn from this strange and terribly sad story, though it does go some way toward explaining Friedkin’s particular interest in this milieu. It also gives urgent, devastated context to the wave of vocal, sometimes raucuous queer protests that dogged the film’s New York shoot — with participants anxious that their community’s losses were being exploited in the name of entertainment.

Pacily edited by Schwarz himself, the film’s own energy and chatter effectively convey a rising tide of queer resistance to socially entrenched homophobia — only for the tone to turn muted and melancholy as AIDS enters the picture, and the feverish New York scene of the 1970s goes quiet, its venues hollowed out and gentrified, its patrons dying en masse. Still, that air of mourning is very different from the burning, personal grief expressed by Verrill’s sister Pamela, as she struggles to comprehend what her brother died for: “Mineshaft” (titled after the key leather bar of the era, replicated in “Cruising”) can’t altogether align these sentiments as it reaches for a kind of closure in its finale. But Schwarz’s documentary is ultimately most perceptive on the enduring power of Friedkin’s film itself — both as a formative, titillating queer text in its own right, and as a early, heedless case study in the industry’s ongoing debate over representation and story ownership on screen.