American Hardcore

Directed by Paul Rachman

American Hardcore is a giddy nostalgia trip for anyone who indulged in the raucous musical experimentation of 1980s counterculture; but clueless minds are unlikely to cultivate much sympathy for this oft-berated youth collective. Like S.A. Crary's Kill Your Idol earlier this year, the documentary suffers from an overabundance of talking heads and low-grade concert footage without providing much analysis, leaving all the insight to aging musicians. Thanks to the miracle of editing, their memories are in synch: More than 20 years after the fact, these faithful soldiers of anti-establishment fury vividly recall the various forces that gave rise to a national hardcore punk scene. Its five year reign is captured with appropriate passion and sympathy. The dense middle section doesn't strain itself to bring the music's jarring power chords and hollering vocals to a larger audience—although that might be the point.

Hardcore punk, as its constituents repeatedly point out, made a decisive effort to disavow any mainstream appeal. There were no pretensions about bestselling albums and rock stardom, because endorsing such aspirations of success would require accepting the fantasies that hardcore punk sought to invert. The movement is explained as a knee-jerk reaction to a post-disco “puerile '50s fantasy” that endorsed the hermetic social norms of Ronald Reagan's America. Contrasting this so-called settled life with the inspired chaos of a Black Flag concert positions hardcore as powerful performance art, commanding more critical attention than any poster-waving protester could hope to achieve. As one interviewee points out, the populist ideal that “It's morning in America” was challenged with “It's fucking midnight, man!”

Unlike the preachy finale of Crary's film, American Hardcore doesn't lead into criticism of rock's current condition, but there are plenty of parallels between the two eras. Former band members recall the hope for change that drove their movement until 1985, when Reagan's reelection signified the vanity of their attempts and paved the way for a surge of cynicism. Self-described veterans of the 2004 election will find kinship in this discussion, which pinpoints seminal punk group Bad Brain's transition into playing Rastafarian reggae (skillfully, but a departure from the honest anger of their earlier work) as a sign of the apocalypse. If only the end of days sounded so sweet.