American socialite Edith Beale Jr. poses in front of her dilapidated mansion in East Hampton, Long Island, in the 1975 documentary film Grey Gardens. (Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

The 1975 documentary Grey Gardens is a one-of-a-kind creation. Alternately tragic and hilarious, it depicted the wondrously strange activities of Edith Beale and Edith Beale, Jr., a pair of mother-daughter eccentrics and former society ladies who lived together as recluses in East Hampton, N.Y. Life was different in the decaying mansion inhabited by Big and Little Edie: in their world, it made perfect sense to wear sweaters on your head, do a soft shoe alongside free-roaming raccoons and subsist on a diet of liver pâté and ice cream.

A cinematic equivalent of The Great Gatsby, the original Grey Gardens shows how quickly the rich can lose everything - including their marbles.

Shot by filmmaking brothers Albert and David Maysles, the documentary had a passionate fan base from the get-go, but in recent years, the love for Grey Gardens has reached a fever pitch. The film spawned a Tony-winning Broadway musical, a gussied-up DVD re-release and it received shout-outs on shows like Will & Grace and Gilmore Girls. If you listen closely to the Stars' song The Woods, you can hear a sample of Little Edie's voice in the background; Rufus Wainwright was more overt in his admiration, penning the song Grey Gardens for his 2001 album Poses. Search the internet, and you'll find oodles of Beales memorabilia: biographies, Edie T-shirts, CDs, scrapbooks, even artwork.

A new HBO movie airing April 18 seeks to recreate the documentary's most beloved scenes, while dramatizing the events that preceded the Beales' decline. Starring Drew Barrymore as Little Edie and Jessica Lange as Big Edie, the film is a respectful and meticulously researched companion piece that will surely satisfy the most die-hard fans. At the very least, it demonstrates the original's enduring appeal.

The Maysles' film benefited from that most sought-after yet elusive documentary ingredient: a subject torn from the society pages. For Big Edie and Little Edie Beale weren't just any garden-variety batty recluses – they were the aunt and cousin of none other than Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis.

Jessica Lange, left, and Drew Barrymore star as Big and Little Edie, respectively, in the new HBO movie Grey Gardens. (HBO/Astral Media)

By the time the Maysles arrived at the ramshackle East Hampton house to film their subjects, the Beales were living in headline-inspiring squalor. As the women rifle through scrapbooks on camera, displaying old photos that reveal their days as belles of Manhattan society, a poignant portrait emerges: of bluebloods in freefall. A cinematic Great Gatsby, Grey Gardens shows how quickly the rich can lose everything (including their marbles), and offers a subtle indictment of an aristocratic family that would cast off its more eccentric members, leaving them to rot in seclusion on Long Island.

But the Bouvier hook is just one of many entry points for Grey Gardens. Cinephiles have been drawn to the Maysles film for its groundbreaking verité — or "direct cinema" — approach. The brothers eschewed stock footage and talking heads in favour of an uncomfortably intimate study of the Beales. Both Big and Little Edie had showbiz aspirations, and they were more than happy to ham it up in front of the Maysles' lens. The film was a forerunner of reality TV. In 1975, it was shocking — some say exploitative — that it left no cat-urine-stained corner of the Beales' private life unexamined.

Grey Gardens has also become an inspiration for fashionistas, who delight in Little Edie's knack for creating stylish riches out of a bag-lady assortment of rags. Today, designers as diverse as Marc Jacobs, Todd Oldham and John Bartlett pay homage to her in their collections, and she has inspired spreads in both Harper's Bazaar and Italian Vogue. (One of the film's most hilarious and oft-quoted scenes involves Little Edie's explanation of why an upside-down skirt is the "best costume for the day.")

The madcap getups might help to account for some of the film's loyal gay following. But while Little Edie's "Revolutionary Costume" is a campy hoot, I'd argue there is more going on in the film that resonates with a gay audience. Like several gay icons before them, the Beales are outcasts who manage to keep on singing in the face of adversity. Suitors and husbands have fallen by the wayside, and there isn't much food or running water in the house, but as long as there's time to perform Tea for Two and hold out faint hope of landing a man (preferably a Libra), the women will survive. As Little Edie suggests, they are staunch characters, and staunch characters "don't weaken, no matter what."

The Beales have elicited comparisons to the tarnished heroines found in the works of Tennessee Williams, but they also recall some of the fierce women found in classic Hollywood pictures like Stella Dallas and Mildred Pierce. It's this aspect of Grey Gardens that had me hooked on first viewing.

The real-life Big Edie Beale, with a portrait of her younger self, in a scene from the 1975 documentary Grey Gardens. (Archive Photos/Getty Images)

In spite of their love for one another, the Beales spend much of the documentary bickering, replaying their own versions of past events — Edie's dashed dreams of stardom are a particularly loaded topic. As Little Edie alternates between declaring her love for her mother and vowing to flee Grey Gardens, Big Edie is playing the same push-pull game – praising her daughter in one instant and delivering sly jabs the next. Even when she's off-screen, Big Edie is a towering presence, barking orders from her bedside. It's no wonder Little Edie finally observes, "Of course I won't get out of here till she dies or I die."

Her remark proved true: Big Edie died within a year of the documentary's release, leaving her daughter to return to New York and bask in her newfound celebrity status. In one of the happiest twists in the Beale narrative, Little Edie eventually achieved her dream of performing onstage, appearing in her own cabaret show in the Greenwich Village Reno Sweeney nightclub.

Like the Broadway revival of Grey Gardens, the new HBO film functions as a prequel of sorts. Much screen time is devoted to the sunny 1940s and '50s, when Edie Sr. was an accomplished singer and her debutante daughter an aspiring model and actress living in New York; after that, the film hunkers down to explore the duo's decline and participation in the Maysles documentary. Barrymore and Lange bear an uncanny resemblance to the real-life Beales. Lange is perfectly cast as the high-strung powerhouse Big Edie, while Barrymore deserves special mention for her spot-on recreations of Little Edie's accent and manic dance routines.

The new Grey Gardens suggests that Little Edie was a spunky oddball who might have made it as an actress in New York had she not been called home in 1952 to tend to her ailing mother. While I welcome this interpretation, I couldn't help wishing director Michael Sucsy had left more to the imagination. Part of the appeal of the original Grey Gardens is that it's a great mystery. For all of their exhibitionism, there was still so much between Big and Little Edie that went unsaid — and I suspect it's these deliberate gaps that keep a diverse range of viewers returning to Grey Gardens some 33 years later.

Grey Gardens airs on HBO Canada on April 18 at 8 p.m. EST. HBO Canada will be airing the original documentary immediately afterwards.

Lee Ferguson writes about the arts for CBCNews.ca.