"You Can't Put Your Arms Around a Memory," by the late New York Dolls guitar player Johnny Thunders, is the opening track of this documentary about the band's bass player, Arthur "Killer" Kane. Before reuniting to play the 2004 Meltdown Festival, the New York Dolls had about the worst luck of any band in rock history, including two failed albums and three dead members.
After the band's dissolution, Kane spent years in failed bands, dedicating most of his time to drinking. Eventually, he gave up on the bands and then there was just the drinking and bitterness. While recovering from injuries incurred in an incident in which he attacked his wife and then jumped out a window, Kane converted to Mormonism. Yet Kane still endured poverty and obscurity, living off Social Security and a part-time job at an LDS family research library, doing work like stocking copiers with paper. He pawned his basses and spent his days talking about the New York Dolls and reuniting the band. New York Doll is uplifting to a fault. And though there are abundant ironies in the Mormon Church helping Kane get his bass out of a pawnshop to go play for a band that glamorized even heroin abuse in song and deed, the filmmakers do not dwell on that. Even Kane's death from undiagnosed leukemia shortly after the reunion is presented less as a tragedy than as sparing him a return to the mundane world.