If you have some received ideas about ballet as a snooty art form imposed on the upper levels of the bourgeoisie by its culture ministers -- as I more or less did -- then Dan Geller and Dayna Goldfine's marvelous documentary "Ballets Russes" comes as a humbling corrective. In telling the amazing story of how a group of dancers who sprang from the exiled and impoverished Russian aristocracy in Paris conquered America and the rest of the Western hemisphere, this movie reminds us that culture flows in all directions at once. It's a profoundly optimistic and delightful movie, for balletomanes and neophytes alike. It made me happy for days afterward.

The original Ballet Russe was the troupe founded by Russian impresario Serge Diaghilev in 1909, which captivated French society but collapsed with the coming of the Great Depression. Geller and Goldfine sketch that history quickly, but focus on the story of the second (and in fact third) Ballet Russe, which produced many of the legendary choreographers and dancers of the 20th century, and spread the art form to all corners of the globe. Small and middle-size cities in Missouri and Queensland and Uruguay have ballet companies and ballet schools today because of the Ballets Russes' indefatigable touring schedule.

Amazing as all this history is, the real fun comes from meeting the former Ballet Russe dancers, a supremely confident and defiantly eccentric bunch who have lived extraordinary lives and in many cases are still living them. Legendary ballerinas Mia Slavenska and Tatiana Riabouchinska taught in Los Angeles into the 21st century. Nathalie Krassovska taught at her Dallas ballet school until the day she died last February -- and we see her here, rehearsing a famous Ballet Russe duet with her longtime partner George Zoritch, who founded the ballet program at the University of Arizona.

It goes on: Irina Baronova, one of the Ballet Russe's famous "Baby Ballerinas" in the 1930s, lives in Australia, is still vibrant at 86, and is planning to publish her memoirs. Frederic Franklin and Marc Platt, the two great male dancers in Ballet Russe history, are still doing choreography, and even dancing a little, at age 90. Maria Tallchief, the American Indian girl from rural Oklahoma who became one of the greatest 20th century ballerinas (and George Balanchine's wife), remains strikingly beautiful. And why not? As Ballet Russe alumni go, she's a baby at age 80.

The various Ballet Russe companies were such a big deal that they were filmed extensively as early as the '30s, and for dance fiends this movie is going to be a much-lusted-after DVD. As a story of -- can I even write these cornball words? -- the power of art to infuse individual human beings with a prodigious sense of purpose, and to penetrate all imaginable boundaries of class and race and nationality, it offers the kind of pleasure you can't put a price on. (Now playing at Film Forum in New York. Opens Nov. 4 in San Francisco; Nov. 11 in Los Angeles, San Jose, Calif., and Washington; Nov. 18 in Boston, Chicago and Seattle; and Dec. 2 in Salt Lake City and Santa Barbara, Calif., with more cities to follow.)

Staying with the inexpressibly strange and inexpressibly sweet, we conclude with Greg Whiteley's film "New York Doll," which I guess details a Ballet Russe-style reunion for the '70s glam-rock generation. Truth be told, Dolls lead singer David Johansen, with his battered-leather visage and age-inappropriate mop-top do, looks a lot worse than some of those 80-year-old Russians.

But this film is not about Johansen's ambiguous voyage from counterculture rock legend to whatever he is now, but rather about Dolls bass player Arthur "Killer" Kane, who dropped out of music not long after the Dolls' 1975 implosion, and wound up in the early 2000s as a Mormon who rides the bus to work at the church's Family History Center in Los Angeles. Kane clearly suffers from various kinds of physical, psychological and perhaps neurological damage the film never discusses, but while his story could be called pathetic it never descends into bathos or kitsch.

I really admire Whiteley's rigorously nonjudgmental handling of the material. He interviews not just Kane's friends from the music world, like Morrissey or Johansen or Blondie drummer Clem Burke, but also his advisors and bishops from the Mormon Church, and all without a hint of condescension. In fact, leaving aside whatever preconceptions or political opinions you may hold about Mormons, it's clear that Kane's spiritual mentors are genuinely thrilled to have a member of a revolutionary proto-punk band in their fold, and want to help him mend the decades-old rift with Johansen and Syl Sylvain (the only other surviving original Doll).

When Morrissey decides to bring these three together for a Dolls reunion concert in London, it seems impossible that A) this damaged, embittered, 60-ish man could get up on a stage and play those songs, or B) that it could possibly be a good experience for anybody to witness or hear. But life, and even reunions of long-defunct bands, can surprise you. Killer Kane and his band rocked the house at the Royal Festival Hall. Those elderly Mormon sisters who worked with him at the Family History Center, the ones who call themselves "Arthur Kane groupies," bubbled over with excitement. Three weeks later, Kane was dead of undiagnosed leukemia. As sad stories go, this is a happy one. (Now playing in New York and Los Angeles. Opens Nov. 4 in Phoenix and Salt Lake City; Nov. 11 in Las Vegas, Ogden, Utah, and Provo, Utah; Nov. 18 in Seattle and Boise, Idaho; and Nov. 23 in Chicago and Dallas, with more cities to follow.)

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