"End of the Century: The Story of the Ramones"

The meek, thoughtful Joey Ramone we see in "End of the Century" is the Joey Ramone we expect. But even though all Ramones fans know that relations between the band's members were always fragile and strained, I wasn't quite prepared for the Johnny Ramone we see here: He's stingy with his snaggle-toothed, boyish smile, as if he hasn't yet figured out how to work it. At various points in the picture, other interviewees assert how controlling Johnny was in any matter concerning the band. And Johnny, although seeming a bit bewildered by the accusations, doesn't refute them. He freely admits, without a whiff of disingenuousness, to having been a really bad kid when he was growing up in Queens. And he's unapologetic to the point of blankness about how he went off with and ultimately married the woman Joey was dating in the early '80s. (They're still married. Joey and Johnny barely spoke in the years after the "girlfriend theft" occurred, and Johnny didn't even want to contact Joey before he died -- for reasons that, as he explains them in the film, seem almost horrifically honorable.)

It may sound like a contradiction to say that Johnny comes off as sympathetically repellent, but that's about the only way to describe the aura he throws off. And it's to Fields and Gramaglia's credit that they capture so much of Johnny's prickly thundercloud electricity. One of the many difficulties the filmmakers faced while they were making "End of the Century" was that Joey assumed they were fixated on Johnny's side of the story, while Johnny felt certain their sympathies lay with Joey. But Gramaglia and Fields clearly love the band too much to favor any one of its members: It's all or nothing in this particular family saga.

While "End of the Century" feels a bit straggly toward the end (the rise of the Ramones is exhilarating; their slow, unfair demise is a downer), and its chronology is sometimes a little vague, the movie captures the spirit of both the band and the era they helped shape. In the '70s, the Ramones were hugely influential in the U.K. (they inspired outfits like the Clash and the Sex Pistols), but Stateside, they were forced to scrabble to get gigs in crummy New Jersey clubs. They made terrific records that didn't sell; they toured, hard, through the '80s and half of the '90s just to make a living. They have always been revered in South America (the movie includes footage of elated Brazilan kids swarming around the Ramones' car). Toward the end of their career, they'd play huge stadiums there -- only to return home to the States to play tiny clubs in New Hampshire.

The passion of fans, unfortunately, doesn't always add up to actual dollars. But even if the Ramones never got to live like rock stars, there's no doubt that they were rock stars of the highest order. Fields and Gramaglia are never cavalier about the band members' fractious relationship. If anything, their movie is imbued with a sense of gratitude that the Ramones would suffer so much internal bitterness in order to give us, their fans, so much rock 'n' roll bliss.

The Ramones sprang to life after the overrated thrills of the '60s had petered out. In the movie, famous punk grandpappy Legs McNeil describes the post-'60s, pre-Ramones universe: "Everything was brown, everything was earth tones ... you couldn't get laid." And suddenly, four people who didn't really like one another that much bounded onto the scene -- the reward we'd been waiting for after suffering through the last, overscripted days of all that peace 'n' love crap. Fields and Gramaglia suggest, without having to twist our arms, that the Ramones helped change the course of our cultural history. They didn't just usher in the end of the century: They gave it its second wind.

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