Review: Doc enlists climate change activists and innovators to teach us ‘How to Let Go’

Spirited dancing opens and ends “Gasland” filmmaker Josh Fox’s new documentary, “How to Let Go of the World and Love All the Things Climate Can’t Change,” but in between is a lot of information more likely to chill your bones than wiggle your rump.

Widening his purview beyond the hazards of fracking, Fox — spurred by the death of a hemlock tree in his backwoods — examines the global effects of a warming planet by traveling to affected areas around the world (post-Sandy Brooklyn, pollution-wracked Beijing, the oil-scarred Amazon); meeting activists and innovators whose mission to make things better is intended to wake us up from our what-can-be-done malaise.

It’s all well and good as a progressive-minded travelogue, since the people Fox finds are inspiring in the face of impending worldwide jeopardy. But his need to insert himself into every element of his fact dump — crying to the camera at one point, playing the banjo, cutting from interviewees so he can continue narrating — is too often grating, as if the environmental crisis needed him as a filter before the message could be made gospel. (He doesn’t even get going on his around-the-world adventure until half an hour of gloomy hand-wringing has passed.)

Even with the over-personalized approach, though, “How to Let Go” says all the right things about an unnerving peril, and the various ways some highly motivated people are trying to combat it.

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‘How to Let Go of the World and Love All the Things Climate Can’t Change’

Running time: 2 hours, 7 minutes

Not rated

Playing: Laemmle Music Hall, Laemmle Ahrya Fine Arts; also on HBO starting June 27