New York Doll

I caught this film at the Sundance Film Festival. It was one of the most popular films of the series. I'm not a big rock fan nor am I a documentary junkie, but I really liked this film. The back story was that the director began filming the story of a fallen rocker just as amazing things began to happen in his life. Catch it if you have a chance. Here is the Sundance write up. New York Doll relates the meteoric rise, resounding fall, and recent all-too-brief resurrection of the seminal New York glam-rock-punk band, the New York Dolls, but it is foremost a story about the band's amazing bassist and leader, Arthur "Killer" Kane. With empathy, respect, and humor, director and friend Greg Whiteley follows Kane and interviews key musicians, friends, and colleagues to uncover the legacy of the Dolls and their significant impact on the London music scene in the dizzying heyday of the early 1970s. After Kane and his band bottom-out on drugs and alcohol, he disappears from music, embracing a surprisingly different path when he becomes a born-again Mormon. When rocker Morrissey organizes a London reunion of the New York Dolls, Kane buys his guitar back from a pawnshop, takes leave of his Family Center library job, and heads back to New York City to prepare for an unlikely comeback. How will the reconstituted band pull off its first performance in 30 years? Can these musicians possibly recapture the energy and élan that made them legends in their own brief time? What awaits Kane after his short reprise in the spotlight? The answers make New York Doll an entertaining, exhilarating, warmly human, and ultimately bittersweet paean to an era and the man lovingly described by friend and band member David Johansen as "the miracle of God's creation."— Diane Weyermann