Bombay Beach, now considered one of the poorest towns in California, was a thriving destination in the 1950s for vacationers wanting to jet ski, fish and lie out on the sandy beach of the man-made Salton Sea. But its population, as of 2010, is 295. An image search will produce a number of photos taken with expensive DSLR cameras that all seem to capture the same scenes of abandoned trailer homes, rotting wood and dead fish.

Bombay Beach has earned a reputation as the epitome of the “failed American Dream,” the product of what happens when economics and nature turn on their people.

But filmmaker Alma Har’el seems to have a different image in mind in “Bombay Beach,” her first feature documentary film. As we look into the lives of the film’s three protagonists, all residents of Bombay Beach, a different narrative of the town begins to unfold.

We meet Benny Parrish, a young boy with bipolar disorder who has to swallow more pills daily than the number of years he has lived. He has trouble concentrating in school and making friends, but in spite of a difficult life and the innumerable foster homes he has gone through, his capacity to love is incredible. As he blows out his birthday candles in one scene, he wishes not for new toys or a bigger house, but “for mom and dad to love me forever.”

We then meet Ceejay, a teenager who moves to Bombay Beach in order to “make it” as a football star and escape sharing the same fate as his cousin, who became another Los Angeles gun death statistic. Through Ceejay, Har’el takes us intimately into the teenage mind, from the first stages of puppy love to the inevitable hanging cloud of the future.

And we meet Red, an old man who unexpectedly anchors the film with the irony, sympathy and wisdom that emanates from his gravely voice. If Slab City, a small section of Bombay Beach, had a mayor, it would be Red. He also acts like a father, husband and friend to many of the “misfits” he affectionately calls his neighbors.

In “Bombay Beach” Har’el captures what so many photographers seem to have missed. The town is much more than the dead fish, broken down trailers and abandoned trash that make up so much of the landscape. Har’el uses her camera in a way rarely seen in documentaries; the lens seems to wrap its arms around each character it frames with surprising sensitivity.

Choreographed dances are also sprinkled throughout, and although the concept may seem strange, such sequences fit among the scenes with a natural ease. Har’el shows us that Bombay Beach can be indescribably beautiful in all of its vastness, under an open sky that seem to stretch on forever. But more than that, she allows us to see and feel the individual relationships of the people who live there, and we cannot help but fall a little bit in love with them, their stories and the place they call home.