SLC Punk! (98 minutes)
"Rebellion happens in the mind. You can't create it...you just are that way."
I learned about SLC Punk (1998) from a middle school hallway. Someone’s older brother’s friend’s cousin had a copy of it, and everyone had watched it last Saturday night at their place. (Why wasn’t I invited? Don’t ask.) “Have you seen it? Have you seen it?” Up and down the hallway. No, I hadn’t. And while my family didn’t have a lot of limitations on what we could or could not watch (I swear to god I saw Cliffhanger when I was like seven), the short, chaotic, Sundance darling about Salt Lake City’s punk scene in the eighties wasn’t necessarily on my parent’s radar at the time, so it had passed me by.
Eventually I saw it one night, used as a backdrop for some mid-level party. And then it drifted out of my consciousness. Until now. With HBO adding it to streaming this month, the world is once again abuzz with Stevo and Heroin Bob. Now, even though I am reluctantly creeping into my mid-thirties, I’ve totally sold out bought in.
I wish I had really taken it in at that party all those years ago, while I was going through my own destructive phase. But, in life, some moments just pass us by.
The movie glimpses the lives of Stevo (Matthew Lillard) and Heroin Bob (Michael Goorjian), two punks living in Salt Lake City in 1985. Punks are a rarity in SLC, buta re growing in numbers when we meet our host, Stevo, who explains the many different divisions between the “tribes”. Punks, posers, Nazi punks, Mods, and more. As anarchists, he and Heroin Bob have no goals other than to live in chaos. This prevents them, of course, from really ever getting anywhere in life. The movie is shot just as chaotically as the two best friends live. We jump from scene to scene and party to party as if we are a newcomer getting indoctrinated. Stevo breaks the fourth wall often, and personally invites viewers into his world. With us in tow, he starts to see the cracks in his plan to live in anarchy forever. Friends go soft-- by falling in love or going to college-- and Stevo himself unexpectedly has his heart broken. Finally, reality hits hard when he loses Heroin Bob to an overdose and he is forced to grow up against his will.
SLC Punk is an impressive and impeccable dramedy, a format we all know can be difficult for other writers and directors to master. Like baking a cherry tart, you gotta balance the sweet and sour just enough so our senses aren’t overwhelmed. The script is good in this sense, sure, but Matthew Lillard’s performance as Stevo is really what makes this movie so excellent and so emotionally complex. Stevo is a bright student (so bright in fact he’s capable of getting into Harvard Law), comes from a wealthy family, and still has good relationships with his parents. And so his choice to live in chaos and accept anarchy is a calculated one, one that dangerously borders on “poseur” status but never does because of his total conviction. It’s an interesting paradox. One must be committed and determined enough to live life in utter chaos. Unlike many other characters we meet, Stevo could easily drift back into a comfortable, “normal”, capitalist life.
Take his best friend, Heroin Bob, for example. Heroin Bob (who is in fact, afraid of needles) comes from a life of chaos, and so anarchy comes easily to him. Bob’s father is a schizophrenic who barely recognizes his son and chases him and Stevo off his property with a shotgun. Instability is Bob’s constant. So when Bob finds stability in Trish--his older, calmer love interest-- two things happen: Bob slows down and Stevo resents him for it.
This unspoken tension between them is palpable on screen, and their relationship is reflective of most friendships that are sustained from adolescence to adulthood. We often rely on our friends to make decisions for us, to tell us what is cool, and ultimately, never change. For Stevo, being a punk was working for him because he had Heroin Bob to do it with. A future didn’t matter because Heroin Bob didn’t have a future. What does Stevo need with a future if his best friend doesn’t have one!? It is so much easier to make not-so-great decisions about your life when your friends are doing the same thing, but then when they start to get their life together it can feel like betrayal and the breaking of a silent code.
This codependency is underlined when Bob passes away from an accidental overdose. In a heartbreaking scene Stevo is screaming at Bob’s lifeless body, “I wasn’t ready for this!” Bob had been drifting from Stevo, but now he is gone completely. This is the moment Stevo reflects back and realizes it was Bob who got them into punk to begin with. It had always been Bob. Without nim, punk doesn’t make sense to Stevo, who shortly after Bob’s death, buzzes off his blue hair and dons a suit for the funeral.
Stevo does get other small doses of reality throughout the film, too. He encounters a former classmate, Sean (Devon Sawa), now homeless on the streets and begging for change. Mark (Til Schweiger), their unhinged older friend, decides to go back to Miami (where he supposedly killed two men). And Mike (Jason Segel) decides to study botany at Notre Dame. The script teases out to us what can happen to reckless youth (they grow up) but somehow as an audience we’re committed to Stevo seeing it through. He would never give up on being a punk! Our naivety was only matched by his own. Which is why Heroin Bob’s death at the end isn’t the only big surprise we need to take in.
Prior to Bob’s passing, Stevo meets Brandy (Summer Phoenix) and falls for her almost immediately. Brandy serves a very important narrative role. She speaks sense to “buying in” as Stevo’s Dad (played by the excellent Christopher McDonald) puts it.
She challenges him by saying, “Wouldn't it be more of an act of rebellion if you didn't spend so much time buying blue hair dye and going out to get punky clothes? It seems so petty. You want to be an individual, right? You look like you're wearing a uniform. You look like a punk. That's not rebellion...that's fashion. Rebellion happens in the mind. You can't create it...you just are that way." Whew. Using her character in this way is a bit heavy handed, but in the fantastical, hyped up world of SLC Punk it feels believable. So I’ll allow it.
Lillard disappears into Stevo, playing the character with comedic lightness and determination. There is humor in anarchy, if you look hard enough. Add in a supporting cast of “not-what-they-seems” and you have an interesting take on what it means to rebel. Heroin Bob refuses to do drugs despite his nickname. Stevo’s dad is caring, likable, patient. Mike looks like a nerd but is the roughest, toughest punk out there. We’re left wondering, along with Stevo, about what it really means to rebel and what the end goal of a rebellion truly is. Are we just trying to upset the status quo or are we affecting change? SLC Punk suggests the goal should the latter, and I tend to agree, but I like to hear all sides to an argument so feel free to lay it down in the comments.
Sources:
https://www.vice.com/en/article/j57qzx/slc-punks-look-back-at-slc-punk-and-agree-its-still-punk
"What does Stevo need with a future if his best friend doesn’t have one!?"
I read this article a while after watching the movie, and I thought you were making one hell of a setup with this line. That question comes back and hits him in the face later on with what happens to Bob, because when that happens, he NEEDS an answer. In a way, it's the very question that forces him to grow up.
Yes!! It forces him to look past today in a way he’s never had to.