Arthur "Killer" Kane (R) reunites with David Johansen in 2004 in Greg Whiteley's New York Doll (Photo: Seth Gordon)

It was January in Park City, and Greg Whiteley had just made it. He had finished cutting his documentary New York Doll the day before its Sundance premiere, dropped off the print and crashed into a seat at the Holiday 3. At which time--with no work left to consume him--his mind wandered.

"It's this tiny theater," Whiteley recalled to The Reeler. "But they just pack as much seating in it as you can, so you get about 250 people to fill it. And then I look around and I realize that the theater is absolutely packed. And then I'm just filled with this anxiety that I hadn't felt before. I wondered if people will like this movie. It hadn't really occurred to us: 'Is this going to be any good or not?'"

In typical Sundance fashion, Whiteley did not have to worry long. Audiences surged and distributors came calling for New York Doll, which recounts the life story of '70s rock star-turned-Mormon librarian Arthur "Killer" Kane with the sort of revelatory, casual complexity that marked some of this year's other accomplished festival alums (Brick, Murderball and The Dying Gaul probably chief among them). In tracing Kane's 2004 reunion with the New York Dolls--the glam-trash icons with whom he was the original bass player--Whiteley bounces from Los Angeles to New York to London with his subject, never wavering from a humble sense of belonging in Kane's miraculous journey. That feeling trickles into interviews with formidable rockers like Morrissey, Mick Jones, Bob Geldof and Chrissie Hynde, whose own Dolls reverence provides an instant accessibility for viewers more accustomed to the cheap gloss of rock-docs like VH1's Behind the Music.

Whiteley admits wanting nothing to do with hagiography, acknowledging that his long-standing friendship with Kane would have made such an approach impossible anyway. The two became acquainted as attendees of the same Mormon church in L.A.; a fan of bands like The Clash and The Ramones, Whitely recognized the New York Dolls name from posters in Kane's apartment, but he relied on Kane himself to fill in the backstory behind the band's legend. All the rock and roll mileposts were there--drug and alcohol abuse, self-destruction, alienation, poverty--but Kane's faith restored his tales with a sense of hope that he might someday resume a music career, especially reuniting with surviving Dolls David Johansen and Sylvain Sylvain.

Kane's reputation crystallized for Whiteley in April 2004, when the two of them attended Morrissey's Wiltern Theater date at the singer's invitation. "As we walked into the concert venue, just by pure coincidence, Morrissey started doing a cover of the New York Dolls' 'Subway Train,'" Whiteley said. "And I thought, 'Oh my gosh, he really is a fan.' And then, backstage after the show, all the band members came up and were just fawning over Arthur. And I thought, 'Man, this is really funny.' Here you've got this mild-mannered 55-year-old Mormon guy, and he's got these rock stars that just revere him. I thought maybe this could be a film."

Whiteley said he had considered off-and-on writing a screenplay based on Kane's life, but Morrissey re-entered the picture a month later when he included the New York Dolls in the line-up for the Meltdown Music Festival he was curating in London. Neither Whiteley nor Kane could believe it; the surviving bandmates had not played together in 30 years, and they were expected to square a set away by July. But if there was a movie to be found in Kane's life, Whiteley decided, that would be the time to find it.

Whiteley bought a camera and began shooting the day he drove Kane to reclaim his bass guitars from the pawn shop where they had moldered for years. In introducing its subject, New York Doll intercuts slice-of-life interviews ("I've been demoted from rock star to schlub on the bus," Kane tells Whiteley one day during his hour-long commute to work at the LDS Family History Library) with archival footage from the 1970s--the latter of which evokes both the reckless character of the original Dolls and reconstructs the abysmal era of drum solos, prog rock and heavy metal into which Kane's colorful band crashed head-on.

The conversations explode the scope of the Dolls' mission into something channeling an ideological assault--the rebel youth of the Dolls waging war against the evil empire of the British concert show The Old Grey Whistle Test, for example. Whiteley's and editor Seth Gordon's masterfully integrate a minimally elegant animated timeline to tie past to present, and their use of still photographs works powerfully to underscore observations of Kane's "pain in his eyes" and his long estrangement from Dolls vocalist David Johansen. Of course, so much of New York Doll's impact stems from Johansen's and Kane's re-acquaintance, which Whiteley has the serendipitous fortune of filming at length in London and New York. Johansen, Kane and guitarist Sylvain share a camaraderie informed by surviving their own myth, and perhaps New York Doll's enduring accomplishment rests in downplaying (if not altogether removing) the irony that stems from the archetypal, shirt-and-tie Mormon fitting in among career rock stars and an audience comprising thousands of fans, memories and high expectations.

On the trail of a "Killer": New York Doll filmmaker Greg Whiteley (Photo: Robin Holland)

"Even flying back from London," Whiteley told me, "I thought I’d witnessed something that changed my life. But I still didn't know what kind of story we had." At the least, Whiteley presumed, they could share the footage with the church, where virtually none of Kane's friends knew anything about his music career. But after another sudden, stunning real-life plot twist changed the filmmaker's mind, he and Gordon embarked on a round-the clock, two-month effort to shape the film for the Sundance application deadline in September ("From the moment the film was bought to the moment when we open it in theaters, it probably took three times as long as it did for us to make the whole film," Whiteley said).

He finished the film less than 24 hours prior to its premiere, adding a carefully acquired, typically brilliant interview with Morrissey and seamlessly interweaving the Dolls' explosive London performance of "Jet Boy" with the infamous Dolls footage from Whistle Test. The 78 minutes zoom by--equal parts rocking and poignant, totally shutting out cliché and sentimentality. "It's not a Dolls retrospective, and it's not a rockumentary," Whiteley said. "It's about this guy, and more particularly, what happened to him over a three-month span of his life."

But there is also the underlying conception of how and why we cling to dreams, with Kane's conception perhaps one of the more resonant in recent film. Of course, there is Whiteley's dream as well--from the Dolls poster on Kane's wall to the middle of the crowded Holiday 3 to tomorrow's New York City opening.

"The idea of making a film that would get into Sundance and then would be released in theaters--I guess you always have that ambition," he said. "But I wouldn't have believed that that would happen when we were shooting. I wasn't sure the reunion was actually going to happen."

Sure, but what about Arthur?

"Oh, he was convinced that not only was the reunion going to happen, but it was going to be a huge success and that millions of people would want to see my film." Whiteley laughed a humble, head-shaking laugh. "Maybe he was right."