“Every time I see one of those ‘history of rock ‘n’ roll’ films,” the writer and director Roger Rawlings said recently from his home in Savannah, Ga., “they say, ‘The Clash broke up and then … Nirvana!'” Mr. Rawlings, a Long Island native who teaches cinema at the Savannah College of Art and Design, is currently in preproduction on “Let It Be,” a film about a fictional band, played by the real Atlanta quartet the Black Lips, that is set during those unsung years of do-it-yourself American music-making. “There was this world between the breakup of the Clash and Nirvana,” Mr. Rawlings said. “A whole era of amazing music.”

Mr. Rawlings, together with his co-writer and director Ed Bradin, knows well the era he seeks to portray. The two Catholic high school chums played, recorded, and toured together in the 1980s band the Altar Boys. “Let It Be” is a narrative re-working of their youth on the road in a pre-Internet, pre-“Guitar Hero” era when apathy, infamy, and ecstasy courted upstart garage bands all over the country. As fictional every-band the Renegades go from obscurity to notoriety and back, the film charts a course through the pregrunge ’80s, an age of such mainstream success-defying cult groups as the Meat Puppets, the Minutemen, Hüsker Dü, and the Replacements.

“It’s kind of like a ‘Gulliver’s Travels,'” Mr. Rawlings said of his film’s mixture of imaginary protagonists and the very real fellow travelers they meet along the way. “‘Peer Gynt’ even more. It’s just the Renegades kind of taking it all in.”

Since their days as the Altar Boys, Messrs. Rawlings and Bradin have worked together on various film projects, including the former’s 2004 directing debut, “Neurotica.” “Let It Be” is a long-gestating labor of love that is nearing realization in part due to the participation of the Black Lips (who will bring their brand of ’60s-inspired garage rock to the Bowery Ballroom tonight and to the Music Hall of Williamsburg tomorrow).

After reading a draft of “Let It Be,” the producer Andrew Meyer (“The Breakfast Club,” “Fried Green Tomatoes”) signed on and suggested that the filmmakers find a real band that fit the material. “You don’t want to use actors,” Mr. Rawlings recalled being told. “You’ll capture two audiences — the band’s young audience and audiences of people hitting 40.”

When Mr. Rawlings happened upon the Black Lips, a group that has parlayed nonstop touring, notoriously over-the-top live shows, and increasingly exuberant and intelligent songcraft into a loyal young following, he was convinced. “They’re it,” the director said to himself. “They’re not shoegazers. They’re not mopey emo. They’re going back to the great garage music that we fell in love with. They’re also growing as songwriters.”

The group filled another bill, as well. “They have a sense of humor,” Mr. Rawlings said. “Besides good taste in music, a sense of humor had to be built in. For us, that was a given. I mean, we couldn’t use Radiohead, you know? Too serious.”

Mr. Rawlings approached the Black Lips via their label, Vice Records. “Once we met the band, we hung out with them for a weekend in New York and went to their shows,” he said. “The second the Lips get on, the whole place starts jumping. That’s what we wanted for the film, is that energy.”

“I guess we fit the description,” the group’s bass player, Jared Swilley, said, adding that he and his bandmates are more interested in the Ramones’ feature debut, “Rock ‘n’ Roll High School,” and the Beatles’ films than in the music video era they grew up in. “We thought it would be cool to try a movie out as a change of pace,” Mr. Swilley said. “Bands used to do that. It’s a lost kind of thing.” While the Black Lips — Mr. Swilley, Cole Alexander and Ian St. Pe on guitar, and Joe Bradley on drums — were a good fit in terms of screen-friendly exuberance and sensibility, Messrs. Rawlings and Bradin’s script evolved to further capitalize on the group’s collective and individual identities. “They’re so smart,” Mr. Rawlings said of the band. “The script has been completely rewritten. We took their personalities and the characters have changed to fit them.”

What hasn’t changed about the film is Mr. Rawlings’s passion to fill an egregious gap in American rock ‘n’ roll movies. “There are some terrific movies about mid’80s music coming out of England, like ’24 Hour Party People,'” he said. “But there was never one from what we lived through in American music.”

Although Mr. Rawlings acknowledged that the seamless blending of re-creations and vintage performance footage that Michael Winterbottom achieved in “24 Hour Party People” set the bar for what he hopes will be equally smooth combinations in his own film, the director offered a cinematic influence much closer to home as an aesthetic foundation for his own valentine to a bygone scene.

“If you want a model rock ‘n’ roll film, see Rip Torn in ‘Payday,'” Mr. Rawlings said. Director Daryl Duke’s criminally unknown 1973 vérité road movie depicting the downward spiral of an ethically bankrupt country star “captured the decadence of the period better than ‘Nashville.'” Robert Altman’s lionized forensic look at an insular music scene was, Mr. Rawlings said, “consciously trying to explore the empty soul and heart of American popular culture. ‘Payday’ didn’t have those pretensions, and yet it revealed that stuff far better.”

Though it will mostly be shot this summer in Georgia and North Carolina to take advantage of local film production tax incentives, “Let It Be” is primarily set in Koch-era New York. The film harkens back to a period in New York’s history when the pursuit of beer, good times, and feedback was a marginalized activity among a small community of like-minded musical thrill seekers in a handful of venues.

“This is an American movie, hands down, no question,” Mr. Rawlings said. “An American study.” But for a creative team that comprises veterans of a decade of dues-paying in the pre-Giuliani city, as well as pre-download and MySpace rock music, their film also documents “the death of old New York,” as Mr. Rawlings put it. Today, the rock bands of every description, filling venues in all five boroughs, bear little of the soot and cheek of those groups that clung to sanity and solvency in the hostile social and economic cave that was New York in the 1980s.

“Nowadays, New Yorkers go from one safe haven to the next,” said Mr. Rawlings, who relocated to Savannah after completing his postgraduate studies in an increasingly homogenous Manhattan. “Doorman buildings? All the amenities? They wouldn’t have survived a night 15 years ago.”