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Best movie of this year hands down!

Fanciful, disturbing, and wildly original, it announces the arrival of a fresh, bold voice in American cinema.

It's a good bad... and worth a popcorn matinée. While it's easy to lament what could have been...

The thing I enjoyed most about the film is the fact that it doesn't shy away from being a super-sized-cliche;

You knew this was just going to be some typical crap just a minute and a half in, when some clueless idiot starts spewing nonsense about Reagan and pretty much is saying the "mean white man" had to put women and "negroes" back in their place, because they became too "uppity." It's downright hilarious when you see idiots such as he talk this nonsense, and add that punk was a "reaction" to the right-wing. He even defends Jimmy Carter and how he spoke of "peace," you have got to love it when anyone has the nerve to get in front of a camera and actually defend Jimmy Carter. (If the democrats are all for peace, why is it they are always by far the most hateful, intolerant and violent people?) And how perfect is it that the man who created punk rock, Johnny Ramone, was a right-wing republican and conservative. The film ignores that so any punks in the 80s were on the right. The bands are good but when it gets political, you pretty much feel like you are dealing with people who are brain dead.Punk is a great music but unfortunately like other forms of music, when the musician gets political, he or she spews out nonsense. Maybe that guy has actually learned a thing or two about the real world by now.

The book entitled "American Hardcore" has been a treasure to me, showing in rich detail the swarms of great bands that graced the front lines of hardcore music for the first half of the eighties (not that Hardcore ONLY existed within this small window). So I was very excited to find out that a movie was being made to amplify the documentation of those great bands.It was a missed opportunity.The movie was not about experience; it was about nostalgia. I would get excited when the film began to show concert footage from one of the bands, only to have the footage end in eight seconds. I couldn't even get a taste for what I was seeing, because the film would rather show Keith Morris talking about how rebellious the scene was, rather than showing us some Circle Jerks and Black Flag footage. The great success of "The Decline of Western Civilization" was that it showed the material and people who had never actually seen those bands got a feel for what was being talked about. However, in "American Hardcore," the audience has to take the interviewee's word that the scene was really something.Not only that, the bonus features were a HUGE disappointment. I was expecting to see the full length footage of all those songs that we only heard the intros to in the film. Alas, only four songs were shown (and I have no idea why- other than the Bad Brains- they chose the four they did).In addition to all of this, The Misfits, one of the most important bands in hardcore history, was not even mentioned (they get their own chapter in the book). Other omissions also confused me (see: Dead Kennedys).At the end, I actually gave it six out of ten stars BECAUSE I love that scene so much. But for all that great material, It could have been so much more. I'd rather see actual footage than aging alternative icons wistfully talking about the past.Better films: "We Jame Econo: The Story of the Minutemen" "Fugazi: Instrument" "Punk Attitude" "The Decline of Western Civilization"I understand that everybody will say in their interview that Black Flag was a great band. Now show it to the viewer.

I think American Hardcore is a good movie to show to people that doesn't have a clue about the roots of hardcore. Mainly here in Brazil, where emocore is kinda dominating the punk/hc scene and the youngest guys thinks Green Day invented hardcore (no joke, I'm serious) and a great injustice was repaired, giving Bad Brains the status they always deserved: one of the most influent bands and co-founders of the style.These were the pro's, now the con's: WHERE IS DK, DRI, SUICIDAL TENDENCIES ON THIS DOCUMENTARY??????? Three of the most seminal bands of the scene (these three between the few ones that stills in activity today) were poorly mentioned, the rising of Bay Area Thrash Metal (heavily influenced by HC) was also ignored and the European bands (that also influenced American bands) were neglected. As far as I know, the scene wasn't just restricted to LA-DC-Boston, and the documentary just ended in a blank note... For those who doesn't know hardcore history, looks like it disappeared in 1986 and had no influence at all on the music produced today.About the political side, sincerely I don't believe 15/16 years old junkies (as the people describe themselves on the documentary) have such political consciousness as they proudly stated; it looked more like angry kids having fun with music, celebrating/living their own lifestyle than a left-wing organized movement (of course there were exceptions)...The chronology looked chaotic to me, although the good footage and some good stories of the past.The veredict is: good, but not that good...PS: I watched American Hardcore right after Dogtown and Z-Boys (a documentary that should be used as template by filmmakers), and I was wandering that Stacy Peralta, Craig Stecyk and Glen Friedman should have been the producers/directors of AHC. Not only for their skills as filmmakers, but because of the involvement of them with the scene (check the book "Fuck You Heroes" produced by Glen Friedman, where he portraits the birth of modern skateboarding at Dogtown, in parallel with the LA hardcore - i.e. Black Flag, Circle Jerks, Suicidal Tendencies first gigs and rehearsals), back when hardcore punk and skateboarding were very closer.

Growing up in the early 1980s in one of the punk hot spots (Austin), I just had to see this film the first day it was out. I can remember like yesterday seeing the Big Boys, the Dicks, DK and Black Flag at Club Foot, the punk venue. It was a great and unique time. I have aged, but still consider myself a punk at heart. However, I was rather letdown by this film. It seems like the guy wanted to make this definitive documentary over the punk scene in the early '80s, but half the people he asked to interview turned him down. The most glaring flaw with this film is the omission of the Dead Kennedys. Yes, Black Flag and the Circle Jerks were huge during that time, but NOBODY came close to rivaling DK, they were it. Yet, there is nothing in the film about them, nothing. Fear is also ignored and so many other greats are just barely touched on. Yet, we get a ton of stuff on the Cro Mags and TSOL? Look, I know that a documentary filmmaker can only use the sources available to him, but it seems that the sources that were available to him (minus Henry Rollins and Keith Morris) were rather small in comparison to other giants like Jello Biafra and Lee Ving. Moreover, there was not enough music in the film. It opens with a nice Bad Brains' cut and montage and then they kind of go away from anymore montages. As someone that experienced the scene firsthand, I just kind of felt it was a rather thin and sloppy look at a very interesting time. Moreover, they drop Husker Du's name a lot, but then never explore anything about them. The guy could have made a better documentary, a much better one. And he could have shown how the punk scene influenced the creation of future bands like Social Distortion, the Replacments, etc.. And how about a shout-out to the freaking Ramones!?