New York Doll
Studio: First Independent Pictures
Rated: PG-13
Website: http://www.newyorkdollmovie.com/
Release Date: 2006-01-05
Cast: Arthur Kane, David Johansen, Sylvain Sylvain, Barbara Kane, Johnny Thunders
Director: Greg Whiteley
WorkNameSort: New York Doll
Our Rating: 2.50
A monkey with iMovie could find drama in the story of Arthur “Killer” Kane, the New York Dolls bassist and bitter glitter also-ran who gave his life to Mormonism and then got his wish to reunite with his bandmates just before his untimely death in 2004. But the incompetently assembled doc New York Doll blunts its impact by not stooping to tell us anything about Kane’s life before he became a Doll, and then cramming the band’s (admittedly brief) heyday into a rushed, dreadfully busy 15-minute collage of performance clips and stills. From that point on, we’re interested but never directly invested, watching in mere curiosity as the grown-up Kane extols the superiority of his new, God-fearing lifestyle (filmmaker Greg Whiteley is in the LDS camp himself, and it shows) while nervously approaching the prospect of the Dolls’ highly anticipated reunion gig. The odyssey is atypical and historically fascinating, but philosophically and structurally lopsided a textbook example of the right-place-at-the-right-time school of filmmaking.
This article appears in Jan 4-10, 2006.