Somewhere in Queens there’s a “drafty, rat-infested warehouse” that four dozen women regard as a home away from home, a venue that a small army of New York roller girls have officially dubbed the “Crash Pad.” It’s not your typical training facility, but then, everything about these ragtag semi-pros defies expectation. What regular attendee of the Brooklyn Academy of Music, for example, would expect to know anything about the Gotham Girls Roller Derby, New York City’s only all-female roller derby league? Well, come tomorrow night, the Crash Pad will almost surely be deserted when members of the GGRD make their way to BAM for a special one-night-only screening of “Hell on Wheels,” a documentary chronicling the roller derby resurgence that began in Austin, Texas, in 2001, and has since spread across the nation.

As this group of Gotham Girls prepares to descend on the BAM screening (alongside the film’s director, Bob Ray) to answer questions about their sport, excitement is building about the GGRD afterparty — a pre-season blowout (the first GGRD match of the year isn’t until April 9) that league president Natily Blair, aka “Ginger Snap,” guarantees will be “one for the record books.” The party, at nearby Moe’s, on Lafayette Ave., will be free for all ticket holders.

While “Hell on Wheels” focuses on the rebirth of roller derby in Austin, the link between what occurred there seven years ago and what has thrived ever since at roller rinks across the country is clear. Essentially, “Hell on Wheels” is a behind-the-scenes road map of the roller derby revival — an American tale of do-it-yourself ingenuity, persistence, and success. “When it originally showed at South by Southwest,” Mr. Ray said recently, “there were a lot of people who came to the movie and told us after, ‘This is not at all what I expected. I thought it was going to be “Girls Gone Wild.”‘ Now, there are sexy women in this movie, don’t get me wrong, but we never set out to make anything like that. The more time we spent around these women, the more we realized this isn’t even so much a sports story as a sociological story. We saw this as something of a social movement, about a group of women trying to start something new, and so we started to approach it as you would a story about business owners and unions.”

Mr. Ray said the idea for the film originated at an Austin bar, where one night he ran into an old high school friend — the valedictorian of his class, no less — who happened to be rolling around the joint on skates. As he started to learn more about the roller derby league that his friend and her colleagues were trying to get off the ground, Mr. Ray and his producing partner, Werner Campbell, decided to take a gamble on the story.

From the very first informal meeting, at which an ambitious group of women decided to launch the organization “Bad Girl, Good Woman Productions”(BGGW), to the ensuing scandals that erupted between the league’s owners and players, Messrs. Ray and Campbell documented more than 500 hours of footage in four years.

“We didn’t even know initially if this league would ever succeed in hosting a game,” Mr. Ray said. “Basically, Werner and I just committed ourselves to being there from the beginning, and we had faith that something interesting would happen.”

By any measure, what happened in the following months and years was nothing short of remarkable. Recruiting and training some 80 women to take part in the sport — an updated but essentially identical version of the infamously violent sport many will remember from the 1970s that sends women hurtling around an oval track at high speeds as “jammers” try to lap skaters and “blockers” try to stop them — the wistful dreams of the BGGW’s founders quickly became reality. Hundreds of fans in Texas turned out for the league’s early matches and thousands of dollars started rolling in. Indeed, it grew too fast. After a series of mistakes were made involving promotional campaigns, budgets, and player safety, a faction of skaters decided to leave the BGGW and found their own league, the Texas Rollergirls.

Mr. Ray, interested less in the novelty of women’s roller derby — which he said started to wear thin at BGGW matches as crowds came to take the contests quite seriously — than in the complexity of this amateur organization, said that audiences have connected with “Hell on Wheels” for its strong depictions of intrepid, independent women.

“In the beginning, the game has all these side attractions that they thought they’d need to get audiences, like spanking and things like that. But the more they grow, the more they drop doing things like that. Some people don’t think of this as a feminist movie, but to me, there’s something very empowering about all this.”

Not unexpectedly, the thousands of roller girls across the country today agree with him. Much as BGGW grew into a movement, so has the audience for “Hell on Wheels” multiplied with time.

“With over 500 hours of footage to go through, it took us six months just to watch what we had recorded,” he said. “But ironically, in that time, all these other roller girl leagues have popped up across the country, and I keep getting requests from these people to bring our film to their town.”

As for the Gotham Girls, Ms. Blair said the New York squad can appreciate Mr. Ray’s film, and the struggles of their Austin counterparts, more than most. “People forget how much it takes to run your own business, the dedication it takes,” she said. “But we’ve had a few more challenges than some might expect.” Foremost, every major rollerskating rink in New York has closed its doors in the past few years. The Gotham Girls have found themselves without a permanent venue, forced to hop among colleges and universities. Even the lease for the Crash Pad — that dilapidated training warehouse — will be up this fall. “If you know anyone who has a warehouse or wants to start a rink, just let me know,” Ms. Blair said, half joking.

Dependent on volunteers and grass-roots marketing, and always in the midst of organizing fund-raisers, Ms. Blair knows all too well the full-time commitment required to keep the enterprise afloat, as well as the camaraderie that such devotion inspires.

“People draw a parallel between roller derby and the punk movement because if you wanted to start a punk band, you didn’t go to the conservatory, you just did it and figured it out,” she said. “Same here. You learn how to skate, how to hit people, how to do merchandise, how to run a league — you have this instant family of over 8,000 sisters around the country.”

ssnyder@nysun.com