E-Mail This Article to a Friend We’re a happy family A new film has the last word on the Ramones BY MIKE MILIARD

They adopted the same surname and made like they were brothers, but the Ramones — punk rock’s founding family — were one horrifically dysfunctional brood. That’s one of many revelations in Jim Fields and Michael Gramaglia’s dark and compelling biopic End of the Century: The Story of the Ramones, which opens Friday at the Kendall Square (see Ted Drozdowski’s review in Arts, page 6). Four more disparate personalities rarely have been impelled to share a stage: Joey, the endearingly gangly goof; Dee Dee, the junkie clown; Tommy, the brains; and Johnny, the glowering brawn. "It was a weird mixture," says Fields. "But their fates were locked together. They knew they were stuck with each other."

As the film makes clear, they were fighting from the beginning: in a priceless scene from one of their first gigs, they argue on stage about what song to play next. Johnny, a blue-collar Reaganite, and Joey, an ex-hippie peacenik, were always at loggerheads. Everyone hated Dee Dee’s psycho hooker wife, and he hated the others for it. The acrimony outlived the band; in 1997, a year after the Ramones broke up, Joey and latter-day drummer Marky waged an astoundingly infantile argument on Howard Stern’s radio show. Joey called Marky a drunk. Marky called Joey a drunk. Marky made fun of Joey’s OCD. Joey said Marky wore a wig.

But the real bombshell, revealed for the first time in the film, is that the band had not been on speaking terms since the ’80s, when Johnny stole Joey’s first true love, Linda. (She’s now Johnny’s wife.) It was a deep wound. When the directors first approached the band members about cooperating on the film, Joey had one condition. "Joey said, ‘I’ll do it if Johnny talks about Linda,’ " Fields says. "It was like a challenge [to Johnny]. Because that was taboo. No one knew about that." In 2001, after protracted negotiations, Joey finally agreed to an on-camera interview. He died of lymphoma two days later, before the interview could take place.

Now Johnny is sick too, with metastasized prostate cancer. When I reach him at home in LA, a day before he’s slated to go into the hospital for surgery, he says he cooperated on the film because "I wanted this to be as accurate a portrayal of the Ramones as it could possibly get" — even though Johnny doesn’t always come off too well. As tour manager Monte Melnick so succinctly puts it in the film, "His personality sucked. Controlling and difficult." Johnny admits that the first time he saw the film, "it disturbed my sleep. I watched it and went to bed after it was over, and I was reviewing it all in my mind and seeing how I was portrayed. It was kind of strange. Like: oh, that’s how I am?"

But it was Johnny who enforced the uniform of jeans and leather jackets. He handled the business end. He was the glue, even when there didn’t seem to be much to hold together. "You want an opportunity in life," he says now. "I felt we were a really good band. And I didn’t wanna blow it. [Despite] other people’s drug and alcohol abuse, I felt it was very important that we do 100-percent our best."

Johnny is not without regrets. He was shocked when Dee Dee died of a heroin overdose in 2002; he says now he wishes he’d done better by his bruddah. And Johnny and Joey never made peace. In the film, Johnny confesses his confused feelings in the days after Joey’s death: there was such bad blood between them that he hadn’t expected to feel anything. Does he miss him? "Well," he says, and pauses. "We didn’t get along. But do I miss him, yeah. Because he was in the Ramones. Once he died, I knew that was the real end of the Ramones."

Not long ago, Johnny issued a statement refuting reports that he was at death’s door. But he admits he hasn’t been feeling well: despite eight chemotherapies and a host of experimental treatments, his cancer is now "in a bunch of spots." He’s at work on a memoir, co-written with Washington Times reporter Steve Miller, but he’s not sure when it’ll come out. "That’s hard for me to say. I’m pretty much done with my part, because I’ve been rushing it and rushing it because of my health. I don’t wanna all of a sudden be halfway through and I die. I told him who I want him to talk to, and if they say anything bad about me, just put it in. I don’t care. In June I was in the hospital for three weeks. Unconscious for seven days. They had me dead. But I lived."

End of the Century: The Story of the Ramones opens Friday, September 3, at Landmark Cinema, 1 Kendall Square in Cambridge; call (617) 499-1996.