Warbling loud, monotonous chants, three brightly colored, nearly naked Hindu holy men carefully pick their way along the sharp backbone of a rocky mountain ridge. The snow-capped Himalayas loom tall and majestic in the distance. Straight off a postcard, this picture-perfect image of personal hardship and natural beauty provides the resounding visual center of "Naked in Ashes," a documentary pivoting around the typical practices of North Indian yogis.

But it's not all mountain vistas. The film spends the bulk of its time down in the riverside slums of Hardiwar and Benares, cities that rest along the banks of the holy Ganga river, an essential location in the beliefs of these Hindu yogis. To them, it is holy Mother Ganga, the source of life. No matter what environmentalists might say about its extreme levels of pollution, they swarm to its banks at least twice a day to bathe in its purifying waters.

One guru in particular presides as the movie's central character, sporting a long, matted beard, large potbelly and thick, ankle-length dreads. He's Shiv Raj Siri, a gregarious and enthusiastic yogi, known for walking about town with his disciples and an oversized, evil-deterring, Neptune-style trident. Within yogi circles, however, Shiv Raj's fame stems from a beloved practice which he proudly terms his "penis-control exercise." Shiv Raj Siri, it seems, has a knack for pulling a loaded Jeep with his bare genitals, and he has the newspaper clippings to prove it (most notably from the occasion on which he performed the feat for the Indian Parliament who apparently had little interest in seeing it).

Just when you think you've got the gist of the yogi life, "Naked in Ashes" pulls a sucker punch (like Shiv's strange penis revelation) and keeps you guessing. The camera pans along the barren scenery of the Ganga's flat riverbanks only to break its solemnity with the signature ringing of a cell phone; but before you can go medieval on the presumably offending theater patron, one of the onscreen yogis cheerfully answers to have a quick word with his downstream guru.

But most yogis do pledge to shun such modern developments, of course, choosing instead a life of austere minimalism. They live in bare, streetside tents. They practice yoga positions of the pretzel variety, paint their bodies with thin, gray coats of holy ash and take issue with social impediments like alcohol. When in possession of excess food, they give to the poor. Their general condemnation of materialism is repeatedly emphasized. They abandon basic possessions like shoes. That annual trek to the Himalayas, and its inevitably snow-strewn trails, is performed barefoot and without complaint.

The cast of such committed persons is predictably colorful, even if the film largely fails to properly distinguish between them. We meet Hanuman Das, a leper who, shunned from other social circles, finds a home and acceptance as a yogi disciple. There's an elderly German woman who founded a Himalayan ashram with her yogi husband. Another yogi mentions his resolution to live on nothing but Ganga water as a necessary abandonment of worldly pleasure. And one notable holy-man-in-training, the "Standing Baba," plans to remain on his feet for the next 12 years in a show of spiritual commitment. For sleep, he rests on a special sling that allows him to stay upright; large open sores have already developed on his calves from the blood flow's heavy strain.

In presenting the radical yogi culture, "Naked in Ashes" wisely excludes an external narrator, instead allowing the yogis to speak for themselves. The notion that the world "wouldn't run without saints and yogis" becomes all the more meaningful when coming straight from the horse's mouth; they see their spiritual-shepherd role in the world as a vital, even necessary one.

But despite the documentary's fascinating material, "Naked in Ashes" fails to fully engage the audience. Its editing is noticeably scattered, jumping from vignette to vignette rather than follow the linear storyline of a single pilgrimage or festival, and the individual yogis become blurred into a single, fuzzy haze of Hindu holy-man culture. Their personal takes on the nature or proper practice of yogi-dom fade into one general concept of the lifestyle.

General agreement on one thing becomes clear - the life of a yogi is a of journey rather than destination. Inevitably, as one man sums up, "even after becoming a yogi, there is no peace." It's this questing and personal straining for which these men seem ultimately to live.