From an early age Richard Hell dreamed of running away. He arrived penniless in New York City at seventeen ten years later he was a pivotal voice of the age of punk cofounding such seminal bands as Television The Heartbreakers and Richard Hell and the Voidoidswhose song Blank Generation remains the defining anthem of the era an era that would forever alter popular culture in all its forms. How this legendary downtown artist went from a bucolic childhood in the idyllic Kentucky foothills to igniting a movement that would take over New York and Londons restless youth culturecementing CBGB as the ground zero of punk and spawning the careers of not only Hell himself but a cohort of friends such as Tom Verlaine Patti Smith the Ramones and Debby Harryis a mesmerizing chronicle of selfinvention and of Hells yearning for redemption through poetry music and art.