Pretty much anyone who was ever into punk rock has some boring story about how it affected them personally. Here's mine (nobody has to read this, but this movie welled up a bunch of old memories and feelings so I feel compelled to exorcise them here):
Last time I saw this movie I was 14 or 15-years-old, sitting on a musty couch with Mary Blackwell in the basement of her aunt and uncles' house in Candler Park. Mary was a senior in high school, and I was a freshman. We met because in some morning period class she would graffiti her desk, and later in the day when the room was used for a completely different class, I would come…

here's my punk story: in high school there was a cool crowd of punk dudes who said i was a poser bitch for claiming i was punk when i wasn't. but i never said i was punk. for whatever reason they really hated me. so to get back at them i wrote a poem about how their rich parents bought all their expensive equipment and got them gigs and sent it anonymously to the literary magazine. everybody knew it was me, though.
eventually i got into the late 80's/early 90's california stuff. when i was 16 i went to a guttermouth show and the then-30ish year old singer hit on me relentlessly and pretty soon after that i started listening…

"Personally, I've been through one too many youth movements."

As always with concert films, mileage will vary depending on one's connection to the music on display. As someone who, when tasked with writing an 8th grade history report on any era of human existence, chose this very scene, the hardcore punk scene in Southern California at the dawn of the 1980s, this is catnip to me.

As Mike Watt wrote and D. Boon sang as part of the greatest punk band of all time, "We learned punk rock in Hollywood, drove up from Pedro. We were fucking corndogs. We'd go drink and pogo." That is this movie.

It's been years since I've seen this and it's interesting to see which…

hahahahahaha punk reflexive self-mythologizing is so fucking stupid and masturbatory and empty. go back to the suburbs, honky. 

you know what’s a jam? like, a great fucking song? teddy pendergrass’ “love tko”. no shitty three chords, no screaming, no whining, no superficial angst, no fuss, no muss, just pure groove. what a beautiful man. making beautiful music. 

I quite enjoyed this, partly because I view punk culture as a kind of amusingly pathetic delusion (fight me with your dumb teenage memories of shitty music, go for it fuckbake, I relish your antipathy) and I think Spheeris didn’t think all that much of a few of these cats either. perhaps I’m projecting but there were more than a few “are these…

My knowledge of punk rock music doesn't extend much further than British staples like The Clash, Sex Pistols and Buzzcocks, so this insight into the hardcore scene of LA circa 1980 was both a fascinating and enlightening experience, director Penelope Spheeris capturing what is a now a valuable document of a particular time and place, whilst also evoking the atmosphere and mood of those involved.

You don't even have to appreciate or understand the music to find this an enthralling experience, where the sense of urgency, anger and nihilism permeates every shot and the raw, immersiveness of the footage speaks for itself. Unlike with her two follow up films, Spheeris doesn't get too involved with the subjects, preferring to remain…

And at the bottom it says “Thank you.” And you can tell ‘em to fuck off.

A documentary capturing the primal, animalistic destruction of the hardcore punk rock scene in Los Angeles in 1979 and 1980, The Decline of Western Civilization is an unflinching and raw study of a social movement driven by an urge to destroy, as director Penelope Spheeris peers into the lives of the various bands that defined the movement, along with an unnerving attention to the spirit of unrelenting chaos they embodied.

Spheeris, who is often heard asking inquisitive and genuinely interesting questions from behind the camera, doesn’t seek to judge the punk rock movement, but rather allow them to speak for themselves, and their swirling rage…