Despite the fact that the Ramones are credited with pioneering punk rock and influencing generations of musicians, they have remained relatively unknown to the wider public. Punk bands that formed directly as a result of the Ramones musical innovations -- bands like the Sex Pistols, the Clash and the Damned -- churned out tracks that became chart toppers while the Ramones were still struggling for gigs. Yet in 2002 the Ramones immortalization in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame was a clear acknowledgment of their importance and a first step in salvaging their name from encroaching oblivion.

Directors Jim Fields and Michael Gramaglia’s End of the Century attempts to continue this salvage operation. They document in an almost prosaically straight-forward fashion the band’s formation and rise in influence. They use the standard documentary technique of contrasting new interviews with archival footage, and apart from the Hall of Fame induction ceremony which opens and closes this doco, they use that simple alternation throughout. This ‘oral history’ approach allows us to see events as they were perceived by the band members and others who worked with them or knew them, but it also limits what we see to the band members’ memories, to the events they are willing to talk about, and to the way that time has shaped their reaction to these events. The result is that the band’s past tends to be buried under the accumulated weight of later experiences. Unfortunately, the filmmakers tend to acquiesce in this situation and never attempt the more difficult task of digging beneath the layers of memory and interpretation to uncover an authentic picture of the band’s early days. What they do give is archival footage of live performances -- mostly poor in quality and visually and acoustically murky. But footage that, nonetheless, manages to communicate something of the Ramones’ raw outpouring of aggressive energy. This ‘now and then’ approach of switching between archival footage on the one side, and reminiscence and commentary on the other, is used by the directors to construct the Ramones as the ‘unsung heroes’, or more accurately, the unsung pioneers, innovators, and trailblazers of punk rock.

The Ramones 1976 tour of the UK set punk rock alight in that country in which it was to have its greatest success. But as punk gained momentum in the UK, the Ramones returned home to America and to playing punk within a mostly cool and unreceptive environment. The Ramones geographical isolation from the UK punk scene may go someway towards explaining their failure to achieve greater popularity. Paradoxically, it may also help explain their longevity: at the heart of punk lies a sense of dissatisfaction and unfulfillment. Punk bands were mostly lads from working class districts who gazed into the future and saw only the present unbearable stifling dead-end. Youths for whom all the doors to education, to success, to financial independence and social status seemed locked. It was precisely the emotions that this situation generated that fuelled punk’s particular late 20th century incarnation of rock. But fame and success were a kiss of death for punk bands. The fact that the Ramones never found this kind of success, and never lost their sense of unfulfillment, might explain how they were able to continue generating punk music for over 20 years. On the one hand, the Ramones failure to become truly famous and their peculiar longevity amongst a plethora of punk groups that flared brightly and burnt out quickly, are perhaps the most interesting aspects of their career and fate. Yet, although Fields and Gramaglia present us with these issues, they never really dig into them. On the other hand, the sense of unfulfillment, the sense of a hunger and desire for something more, and the explosive anger directed against society that lies at the core of the Ramones music offers the most likely point of emotional connection for a wider public who are devoid of the devotion of diehard fans or the interest of professional musicians or music historians. Here again, however, the filmmakers fail to join the dots. The effect of these omissions leaves End of the Century hinting at depths that are never explored and choosing instead to let the Ramones long musical odyssey slide across what feels like a shallow conventional surface. And here’s another omission, an interesting and perversely tantalizing fact: four species of trilobites, a long extinct now-famous marine organism that once fed on the detritus-rich ooze of the ocean floor, have been named after Ramone members. Surely that’s gotta be a first for punk rockers!