Pitchfork

Current trendhoppers may be surprised to learn that the 1980s weren't all one big John Hughes movie, that some alienated (mostly) white youth rejected the choice between Duran Duran and Mötley Crüe. These Reagan era moppets of suburban rage have been felt more than they've been seen or heard in recent years: with hardcore punk, they created a sound and a scene that forever altered American youth culture, bearing fruit as diverse as Metallica, the Beastie Boys, and Blink-182. But the resolutely anti-commercial hardcore era has been left out of most mainstream punk histories, lost in a Dark Age between the Ramones and Nirvana.

Writer Steven Blush brought these shadowy years into the light with his 2001 oral history American Hardcore: A Tribal History, and now he's joined with video director and fellow hardcore scenester Paul Rachman to produce a documentary film of the same name. The 90-minute American Hardcore premieres this Friday, January 20 at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah, with four further screenings scheduled throughout the festival. Yes, we know there's something weird about a film chronicling a raging basement revolution being brought to the public via a star-studded event like Sundance, but, hey, punks gotta get paper just like the rest of us.

Cobbling together footage from "before even the VHS video revolution," as Rachman told Billboard, the film includes vintage live clips of bands like Bad Brains, MDC, Minor Threat, and Black Flag, along with numerous contemporary interviews with the grown-up versions of the scene's major players. "I think the most interesting thing to me was to see what has happened to people [in the last 20 years]," Blush told Billboard. "You see how poor some of these people are, and how bitter some of these people are-- people who did not get their due."

A decidedly un-punk premiere party will take place at the Star Bar in Park City on January 25, featuring performances by the Circle Jerks and D.O.A. It's sponsored by Vans and there will be free Stella Artois and Aquafina. Somewhere, Ian MacKaye is banging his head against a wall.

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