American Hardcore: Critic Reviews

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.

This documentary chronicle of the hardcore punk movement in the first half of the 1980s imagines an underground culture that was more than a new generations style of hormonal eruption.

A valuable chronicle of a brief and snarling musical movement.

The film's a pretty good scrapbook ... and it evinces a healthy cranky-old-man disgust with the mega-platinum punk acts of today.

Rachman's montage is a frenzied, propulsive pull from here and there -- including not just an astonishing array of milky VHS concert footage (Black Flag in 1981!), but both Ronald Reagan inaugurations, the second of which seems to foretell the end.

Instead of an insightful look at disaffected youths finding an outlet for angry energy in rock rages, American Hardcore is a slanted history lesson coming solely from its subjects.

What's irritating about the movie is how much time it spends on empty nostalgia -- shouldn't real punks scorn reminiscing? -- and how little time it spends truly exploring the roots of America's punk prime in the early 1980s.

Exhaustive and at turns exhausting, American Hardcore explores 1980s punk subculture with the frenetic energy of mile-a-minute mosh-pit music, sealed with a fist.

American Hardcore, Paul Rachman's impressively thorough documentary, tells of the second-generation punk rockers who learned from the Sex Pistols and Ramones and then did their DIY thing.

Leaves little doubt that this truly was one of the wildest eras in rock.

... an enjoyable if incomplete nostalgia trip.

[This] sharp survey brings an insular, now largely forgotten scene back to vivid life.

Inspired by a book by Steven Blush, Rachman deftly sketches the hardcore scene in a dozen cities and chronicles the growing violence that signaled its demise.

A reverential but knowledgeable documentary about an aggressive offshoot of punk that flourished on the Left Coast from 1980-86, with outposts in such far-flung locales as Washington, D.C., New York, Boston, Detroit, Chicago and Austin, Tex.

Paul Rachman's cultural-history doc American Hardcore unearths an astonishing trove of material from the all-but-forgotten American punk scene of the early '80s.

Based on the 2001 book by Steven Blush, Paul Rachman's raw and riveting documentary traces the rise of of hardcore punk through Los Angeles, Boston, D.C. and the Big Apple.

The documentary is an enlightening journey to a dark corner of contemporary punk's dank little basement.

For a documentary ostensibly about the history of the hardcore punk music movement that reigned in America during the '80s, director Paul Rachman and writer Steven Blush indefensibly omit the genre's most talented and high-profile band (The Dead Kennedys)

Struggles under the weight of its own ambition.

The hit-and-run effect sometimes suggests a documentary equivalent to slam dancing, but without the bruises.

Rachman's chronicle suffers not from a shortage of authentic footage of ready-made hardcore shows, complete with (completely necessary) subtitled lyrics, or doughy, balding, talking heads still bragging about the thrown punches and peed-on chicks of yeste

A film for the fans, especially if you were one of those sonic youths venting steam at a guerrilla show in someone's basement, a VFW hall or club that condescended to present a hardcore show. For once-upon-a-time kids now irrevocably middle-aged, the kick

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