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'Hardcore' thrashes through punk rock’s origins
Movie Review: American Hardcore
By John Wirt
jwirt@theadvocate.com
Advocate movie critic
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out of 4 stars.
The raw style of American Hardcore — an affectionate documentary about American punk rock, circa 1980 to 1986 — fits its fiercely simple subject. The film mingles vintage video and Super 8 film of young men, and a few women, thrashing on tiny stages in small, sweaty spaces with post-millennium interviews featuring musicians, promoters and others who forged the underground hardcore scene.
Filmmakers Paul Rachman and Steven Blush earned the credentials to make American Hardcore. Both are veterans of the ’80s hardcore scene as well as the film and publishing worlds. They’ve also made their film soon enough to get many first-person accounts from the real hardcore rockers of the era.
But being such lovers of the music, Rachman and Blush lose their objectivity. Their film grows rambling and shapeless, its momentum slowed by nostalgic, redundant testimonies. A great punk-rock song is short, fast, furious. American Hardcore tends to drone.
And amidst all the fond remembrances, an important point is nearly lost: Hardcore punk of the 1980s set the stage for the mainstream success of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Beastie Boys, Nirvana and more. The filmmakers let musicians and scene-makers do all the talking, so there’s no narrator to provide perspective and tie up chaotic ends. Even so, the film’s lack of discipline echoes its unbridled subject.
American Hardcore does a better job of portraying the music’s rebellious origins and aesthetic. Ronald Reagan’s new old order and an increasingly quaint mainstream were ideal things to rebel against. Bored, disenchanted American kids created the most frenetic music ever made in America. All they needed were a few chords, a microphone and an audience of fellow angry young misfits.
And the musicians’ motives were pure.
“No one ever made a record and said they’re going to play that on the radio,” TSOL’s Jack Grisham says. “You’re not accepted. They’re not gonna play you. You’re just doing this or the fun of it … because you love it.”
“It was fast, it was loud, it was angry, it was unpredictable,” Minor Threat’s well-preserved Ian MacKaye says. “That’s what kids were. We were just kids going wild, and I thought the music perfectly represented that.”
Hardcore punk further served as the raging antidote to such shadow-casting ’60s acts as the Doors and the Beatles and ’70s and ’80s radio stars Journey, the Eagles and Fleetwood Mac.
“They’re all great bands for what they do,” Mike Watt (Minutemen, fIREHOSE) says. “But when you hear it constantly, over and over and over again, you’re gonna wanna vomit or jump off a cliff.”
American Hardcore’s on-screen map of the United States locates members of such key bands as Washington, D.C.’s Bad Brains, Minor Threat and Black Flag, New Jersey’s Misfits and Boston’s SS Decontrol. The still vital Watt is among the more quotable, but some others could just as well be left on the cutting-room floor. Of course, audiences in the various music scenes represented in American Hardcore will cheer for their local talent, no matter how fleeting their appearance.
American Hardcore is not a great documentary, not nearly as good, for instance, as the 2005 Ramones documentary, End of the Century.
It’s a film for the fans, especially if you were one of those sonic youths venting steam at a guerrilla show in someone’s basement, a VFW hall or club that condescended to present a hardcore show. For once-upon-a-time kids now irrevocably middle-aged, the kick of seeing familiar faces in the bloom of riotous ’80s youth, and then again some 20-some years later, is enough.
