Punk Rock Movie Club

A botched sex-change operation, a Kansas trailer park, a stolen songbook, and Plato's Symposium all held together by Stephen Trask's songs, which move without warning from glam stomp to power ballad to something genuinely strange, and by a performance at the center that is funny, furious, and in the end unexpectedly generous.

It is loud, sequined, raunchy, and formally rigorous all at once. It holds comedy and devastation in the same hand without dropping either. The ending earns every note it plays.

Released in 2001, it arrived at a moment when queer cinema was still expected to justify its own existence, to be tragic enough to deserve sympathy or invisible enough not to cause offense. Hedwig ignored all of that entirely. It won Best Director at Sundance, opened in nine theaters, and found its audience slowly and then permanently. It did not so much cross over as burrow in, becoming for an entire generation the kind of film that feels like it was made specifically for you. The Broadway revival a decade later won four Tonys. None of that dimmed the original. Cult films rarely survive that kind of legitimization. This one did.

The Harder They Come (1972) is a Jamaican crime drama directed by Perry Henzell, and a landmark of world cinema.

The film follows Ivan, (Jimmy Cliff) a young man who arrives in Kingston with dreams of reggae stardom, only to be ground down by corrupt power at every turn — predatory music industry bosses, an exploitative church, and a brutal police state. Trapped in poverty with no legitimate way out, he turns outlaw, becoming a fugitive whose rebel myth grows larger than the man himself.

For punk rockers, the film is essential viewing. Its raw depiction of the poor being systematically crushed by institutions — and one man's refusal to submit — spoke directly to punk's rage against the establishment. The Clash and others drew heavily on reggae's defiant energy, and this film was a key cultural bridge between Kingston's sufferers and the kids in London council flats who felt equally locked out. The soundtrack — Jimmy Cliff, Toots and the Maytals, Desmond Dekker — helped ignite that connection.

A righteous, angry film about power, poverty, and resistance.

Rock 'n' Roll High School (1979), directed by Allan Arkush, is a gleefully anarchic musical comedy. Riff Randell is the biggest Ramones fan at Vince Lombardi High School and its worst behavioral problem, squaring off against the school's new iron-fisted principal, Miss Togar, who is determined to stamp out rock and roll once and for all. When the Ramones actually show up, the students and the band join forces, and the confrontation escalates to its logical, explosive conclusion.

When the studio wanted to retitle the film Disco High, Arkush refused. "Disco is music of people with money, who took limos to discos," he said. "Rock and roll was about violence and rebellion. You couldn't blow up a high school to disco music." That tension between commerce and chaos is baked into every frame. Playing like a 1950s teen rebellion picture run through a punk blender, it became a midnight movie sensation and cult classic, with a soundtrack that includes Ramones staples like "Blitzkrieg Bop" and "Teenage Lob

In partnership with the annual Catskill Indie Music event of the summer "Drom Fest" organized by the amazing Dromedary Records, Punk Rock Movie Club is thrilled to present Radiation (1999), Co-directed by Suki Hawley and Michael Galinsky, (Who will be at the showing to answer questions) this is a darkly comic indie film set in the Spanish underground music scene. Unai is a cynical Spaniard who books American indie bands up and down the Iberian peninsula — exhausted, disenchanted, with nothing to show for his years of struggle beyond an empty wallet and a tenacious speed habit. Then he meets Mary, an impulsive Lower East Side artist who captivates him with a punk spirit he feels he has lost — but when he invites her to join his tour, the enterprise quickly collapses into an all-too-familiar routine of chiseling club owners, shifty speed pushers, and rude patrons. 

Shot in a gritty, documentary style, the film mines the tumultuous terrain of indie rock to deliver a well-crafted and darkly humorous portrait of a cynical Spaniard's degenerative journey, capturing the jaded texture of life touring too many smoky, small-time bars. The film premiered at Sundance and went on to play at over 40 international festivals, and includes appearances and performances by Stereolab, Come, Will Oldham, and Two Dollar Guitar.

Danny Says (2015) 

Trailer 

Danny Fields is a missing footnote in almost every history of American punk counterculture. Harvard Law dropout. He moved to Greenwich Village in 1960 and spent the decade drifting through every significant scene simultaneously — Warhol's Factory, the downtown music underground, and, improbably, the offices of teen fan magazines, where as managing editor of Datebook in 1966 he republished John Lennon's remark that the Beatles were more popular than Jesus. The firestorm is widely credited as one of the reasons they stopped touring altogether.

Elektra Records hired him as publicist — unofficially under the title "Company Freak," because, as founder Jac Holzman put it, he stayed up later than anyone else. That same year he flew to Detroit to see the MC5. Opening for them was a band they called their "little brother" — the Stooges. Fields signed both on the same weekend, in the MC5's kitchen. His boss was not thrilled.

He discovered the Ramones at CBGB in 1975, decided within 15 seconds, and sealed the deal by coming up with $3,000 for a new drum kit — his mother paid for it. He brought them to London in 1976, and the Sex Pistols, the Clash, and the Damned were all in the audience. They fired him in 1980 for not getting them a hit record. They never managed that without him either.

He also introduced Iggy Pop to David Bowie. This documentary is his long-overdue portrait — loose, digressive, fan-worshippy. So was Danny. That feels right.