Dee Dee Ramone's fatal drug overdose in 2002 has to count as one of the least shocking rock 'n' roll deaths of all time. An original member of the Ramones (and writer of some of the band's best songs), Dee Dee struggled with drugs for years, at one point dropping out of the band to get clean, only to find new ways of staying dirty. For Ramones watchers, Dee Dee's death was like the long-delayed punchline to a bad joke, as well as a sad punctuation mark to Joey Ramone's less-avoidable death a year earlier. Dee Dee used to complain that the other Ramones refused to let go of their original, leather-and-long-hair image, but he ended up living that image to its cartoonish extreme, even releasing a late-career Ramones covers album to pay the bills. Running just over an hour, the Lech Kowalski documentary Hey Is Dee Dee Home consists of little more than a single Dee Dee Ramone monologue, but it does much to get at the human beneath the cartoon. Recorded in 1992 for use in Kowalski's Johnny Thunders documentary Born To Lose: The Last Rock And Roll Movie, Hey Is Dee Dee Home is low on flash but rich in detail, as Dee Dee recounts life as a rock 'n' roll junkie, tellingly having more to say about scoring and shooting up than about his musical legacy. Focusing on Dee Dee's relationship with Thunders and providing virtually no context, Hey isn't the definitive document it could have been, and it might baffle those not already familiar with Dee Dee's career. Remaining sweet even as he relates one moment of excess after another, Dee Dee is a mesmerizing storyteller, however, and without Kowalski's intended focus, he might not have spent so much time detailing the film's grisly highlight: a late-'80s attempt to form a Paris-based punk supergroup with Thunders and Dead Boys frontman Stiv Bators. (Quick synopsis: It didn't work out.) In Hey, Dee Dee looks healthy, vital, and committed to staying sober; he runs out of words only after stating, "I got, like, six months off it, and my other friends are all dead." Ten years later, he left such statements to others. The DVD edition of Hey Is Dee Dee Home comes with temporary tattoos modeled after Dee Dee Ramone's, but anyone who wants to be in his skin after watching the film has had fair warning.