American Hardcore (2006)
Envision Films

Description

Fueled by a ferocious soundtrack, director Paul Rachman's American Hardcore gives fans an all-access pass to the rise and fall of the U.S. punk scene, an explosive musical and cultural phenomenon that shaped everything from the grunge movement to the emo and pop/punk music currently riding the charts. Set against the conservative early '80s political landscape, American Hardcore chronicles the homegrown hardcore scene that was a swift kick in the head to corporate rock and mainstream complacency, as disaffected teens adopted the same collective credo - harder, faster, louder. From downtown warehouses to suburban bedrooms, the scene spread from city to city like wildfire, uniting bored, angry outcasts into an authentic underground revolution. A raw blast of politics, passion, and rage, American Hardcore features never-before-seen live footage from Black Flag, Minor Threat, Bad Brains, MDC, SSD, DOA, DRI, The Adolescents, 7 Seconds and many more, plus exclusive interviews with punk icons like Henry Rollins, Ian MacKaye, Keith Morris and H.R. (Paul Hudson).

Tags

1980s, Punk music

Collected reviews and ratings

9.0 Variety | Dennis Harvey

The wealth of mostly vid-shot archival footage is often very rough in quality, but that suits hardcore's defining do-it-yourself doctrine. Jon Vondracek's graphics amplify aesthetic of the cut-and-paste Xerox art hardcore claimed as its own, while Rachman's editing is dynamic.
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8.7 DVD Verdict | Ryan Keefer

It's a welcome retrospective, featuring the movers and the shakers of bands that helped shape the scene, and as it was said in the film, there may be another rock movement, "but it can never be hardcore."
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8.3 Entertainment Weekly | Gregory Kirschling

... American Hardcore is illuminating nostalgia, stuffed with all the right tattooed talking heads (like Black Flag's Henry Rollins), plus grim-looking concert footage of wailing skinny guys.
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8.3 The Onion A.V. Club | Noel Murray

All that said, American Hardcore is still a raucous, relevant documentary, capturing the mood of the times and the participants' best anecdotes. And the archival footage is invaluable.
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7.5 Rolling Stone | Peter Travers

Messed up as it is, you can't tear your eyes away from this explosion of brutal sounds and images.
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7.0 Salon.com | Andrew O'Hehir

A lot of these bands sucked then, and suck now. They had nothing to offer but unchanneled, incoherent rage. But the Bad Brains, and Black Flag, and DOA, and Flipper, and Negative FX, and a few others, fucking rocked ass.
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7.0 New York Times | Stephen Holden

Directed by Paul Rachman, from a screenplay by Steven Blush based on his book “American Hardcore: A Tribal History,” the film, which is filled with grainy archival clips of hardcore performances, is a toned-down cinematic equivalent of the music: fast and loud, but not too loud.
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7.0 DVD Talk | Ian Jane

While it's true that American Hardcore is by no means a comprehensive look at the scene and the era and that it leaves out a few key bands and people, it does give viewers a decent, well-rounded look at what the hardcore punk movement was all about and how it started.
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7.0 Amazon user reviews

This documentary tackled an awful lot, and would have been better off as a longer series. Too bad the subject matter is too intense for Ken Burns ...
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6.3 TV Guide | Ken Fox

... Paul Rachman's documentary is a fan's-eye view of a musical phenomenon, and a surprisingly shortsighted one at that. The film features virtually no commentary from anyone who wasn't part of the original scene and who might put hardcore into a larger cultural context, and ends up an intermittently interesting laundry list of same-sounding bands.
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6.0 Boxoffice Magazine | Sheri Linden

Rachman's film captures that experience in all its sweaty, often violent glory, through excavated personal stashes of blurry performance footage shot on VHS and Super 8.
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6.0 filmcritic.com | Chris Barsanti

... Paul Rachman's encyclopedic and exhausting American Hardcore will serve as a decent chronicle of hardcore's sharp short years festering in the American underground.
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