For those of you who don’t know, in the wake of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., a series of race riots broke out in major cities all over America. On one night in April of 1968, James Brown put on a show at the Boston Gardens. The televised broadcast of his performance is said to have kept the streets quiet that evening, giving citizens a distraction from looting and unifying the city in peaceful memorial to one of history’s great professors of peace itself. In his new documentary for VH1, director David Leaf wanders around the happenings of that evening, retelling the story of how Brown became a savior to the people of Beantown.

It’s hard not to think of The Night James Brown Saved Boston as failing on many levels. It’s trite, pandering and not terribly informative. What could be a fascinating account of a legendary concert turns into kind of a mess when Leaf tries to grasp too much extra James Brown history within the 1 hour plus running time. Can you really blame him? He can’t really seem to make one of the most electric stage performances of all time come alive with his bland cinematic rhetoric. The pieces of the concert itself that are in there are overrun by incredibly run of the mill interviews by important figures of the time (Rev. Al Sharpton comes to mind) explaining what’s happening in the footage instead of letting it speak for itself.

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