A documentary by Billy Corben. Rated PG. Opens Friday, September 23, at the Denman Place Cinema

After trying his luck in Toronto (where he gave Rush its start), then Miami and Atlanta, Manhattan was the logical destination for the young, eyepatch-wearing Peter Gatien, who was the victim of a freak hockey accident as a child in Cornwall, Ontario—and how Canadian is that?

Gatien’s entrepreneurial formula, in the 1980s and ’90s, was to spread the fabulousness of the earlier Studio 54 scene to the masses so outer-borough mooks and Mindies could mingle with drag queens and club kids in a nonstop party atmosphere. His jewel among four giant venues was the Gothic church he turned into Limelight, a warren of rooms and lounges that hosted varying subcultures, all brought together by the fortuitous rise of the “love drug”, ecstasy, and later fractured by Special K and other, more antisocial, drugs.

If omnipresent intoxicants provided social glue, they also gained the attention of then-mayor Rudolph Giuliani at the height of his frenzy to clean up New York. Not a prodigious partier, at least compared to his forebears, the flamboyant Gatien (pronounced Gay-shun by everyone) nonetheless became a high-profile target of federal, state, and local investigations—especially when his clubs started catering to the hip-hop crowd. This turn in (and drain of) his fortunes shifts the well assembled movie from giddy culture crawl—with convicted killer Michael Alig and sometime house-deejay Moby as intriguing witnesses—to true-crime investigation, with Village Voice reporter Frank Owen among the colourful tour guides.

Considering director Billy Corben’s access to Gatien (daughter Jen Gatien is one of the producers), it’s not surprising that Limelight reads as an extended defence of its subject. Odd, though, that it never mentions his other ventures, into film and theatre, for example, nor his First Nations background, which eventually mattered in his legal battles. More crucially, no one ponders his motivation to open clubs in the first place. He doesn’t volunteer any insights either.

Watch the trailer for Limelight.