Hey! Is Dee Dee Home? (2003)

Directed by: Lech Kowalski | 64 minutes | documentary, biography, music | Starring: Dee Dee Ramone, Joey Ramone, Johnny Thunders, Richard Hell, Billy Idol, Landau, Jerry Nolan

Douglas Glenn Colvin had already had a turbulent life when he founded the punk group The Ramones in 1974 with his friends Johnny, Joey and Tommy. Born in Germany and raised without a father, Colvin, better known as Dee Dee Ramone, made his living as a male prostitute for a time. In addition, the bassist was already on drugs at a young age and as a member of The Ramones his way of life would not become much more civilized. Despite this wild life, Dee Dee managed to write one beautiful song after another.

Enough material for a fascinating documentary. Unfortunately, ‘Hey! Has Dee Dee Home’ not become that in the least. It’s not about the style. The film is entirely fabricated according to the punk credo, which says that anyone who can hold a camera and have something to say can make a film. It would therefore be silly to whine about poor lighting, hopeless framing and mediocre sound. For a documentary about a punk rocker, this makes sense and it works fine here.

The problem is more in the content. The interview with Dee Dee was originally conducted as part of a documentary about another musical junkie: Johnny Thunders. A large part of the conversation is about the love/hate relationship between the two musicians and therefore inevitably about their drug use. That results in a rather superficial whole; the anecdotes differ little from the stories an average junkie can tell you and the continuous namedropping doesn’t really help either. The few archive footage doesn’t yield anything interesting either, except for a far too short piece of ‘I Don’t Wanna Walk Around With You’.

What ‘Hey! Is Dee Dee Home?’ worth a little more is the image we get here of an archetypal rock musician. With all his tattoos, boyish guitar pounding and tough talk, Dee Dee is the ultimate proof that true rockers never grow up. Ironically, Dee Dee himself seems to think the opposite. At the time of the interview, the bassist had been clean for a while and he does everything he can to appear balanced and wise. But if you look more closely and listen more closely, you will see and hear a boy who will never grow up.

Dee Dee Ramone died on June 5, 2002 of a heroin overdose. Friend and rival Johnny Thunders had already preceded him in 1991.