For more than a hundred years, the Chelsea was a bohemian roach motel: Artists checked in, but they never checked out. At one time, it was the tallest building in New York, and it remains a place of tall tales and ghost stories.

But recently, many of the starving artists, musicians and actors who made it legendary have been forced out by new management intent on turning the fabled flophouse into a boutique hotel.

Abel Ferrara, the bootstrap director best known for "Bad Lieutenant," recounts and re-creates the history of the hotel in his first documentary, "Chelsea on the Rocks." Like the lodging, this meandering movie is frayed around the edges and has a whiff of horror about it.

Although the Chelsea has hosted luminaries such as Bob Dylan, Arthur Miller, Joni Mitchell and Dylan Thomas (who died there), Ferrara focuses on the semipermanent struggling artists who gave the place its peculiar charm. It's a cheap, vicarious high to hear these unidentified denizens reminisce about the orgies and overdoses that seem to have been included with the rent.

Ferrara revisits the hotel's most infamous fatality in a re-enactment scene suggesting that Sex Pistols groupie Nancy Spungen (Bijou Phillips) was stabbed by drug dealers, not by the stupefied Sid Vicious.

For better or worse, the wild times mostly ended when patronly manager Stanley Bard ceded control to deep-pocketed developers. Even as Bard, filmmaker Milos Forman and Ferrara himself bemoan the changes, the lobby is filled with fine art — and guests who aren't likely to harm you.

As Chelsea resident Thomas Wolfe said, you can't go home again.