AMERICAN HARDCORE
R, 98 minutes

If punk music is supposed to be about rebellion (current practitioners should note the “supposed to be”), then the form of it that dragged itself across America like a violent, drunken hobo during the early 1980s was the most anti-everything brand of music the world has ever had the pleasure to know; so anti-everything, in fact, that it inevitably destroyed itself just six (or so) years after it began.

Paul Rachman’s new documentary, “American Hardcore,” attributes the movement that spawned such bands as Jerry’s Kids, Circle Jerks, and Zero Boys to Reaganomic outrage and the onset of the preppy culture, which was itself a reaction to the listless bell-bottomed hippies and weirdos who roamed the 1970s. Apparently, if “It’s Morning in America” made millions of Americans feel like the best years of their lives were yet to come, it made another few hundred thousand or so feel like destroying everything they encountered.

Sure, the original hardcore set was largely from the segment of the country being trickled on rather than the one doing the trickling, but Reaganism was just a word to most of them. The cause of their anger was the same one that ripples and pulsates and roars beneath all rock ‘n’ roll movements, namely parents, homework, authority, and general responsibility.

By 1980, after brash, unvarnished punk bands like the Ramones and the Sex Pistols had proven that you didn’t need to be a musician to be a musician, kids from Los Angeles to Boston picked up guitars and microphones and set about making the loudest, crudest racket they could muster. To a large degree, concepts like melody and songcraft were jettisoned, but no one could ever accuse these battlefield rock stars of not meaning it. The scar you brought home from a Circle Jerks show was a badge of honor.

Rachman’s film, written by Steven Blush and based on the latter’s book of the same name, gathers archival footage of the train wreck that ensued and safetypins it to a number of mildly entertaining interviews with the people who were there and survived with the ability to speak. (One particularly worthwhile anecdote concerns concert-goers gaining admission to shows with homemade bombs in lieu of tickets).

The footage, shot mostly by spectators as preoccupied with dodging beer bottles and bodies as with pointing and shooting, captures a youth movement that was at once frightening and electrifying. Teenagers jump up on stage and go flying literally head over heels back into the crowd, geysers of beer paint the walls and ceilings, fights break out at the drop of a boot; and all the while, bands like Black Flag and Bad Brains play on, adding memorable songs (in their cases, anyway) to the rock ‘n’ roll canon that inspire another new garage catastrophe every day.

Mr. Rachman seems unconcerned with charting that legacy, however. The point here is that the male-dominated hardcore movement (not misogynistic, but not exactly tolerant, either) captured the ethos of a small group of people on the outskirts of the mainstream before it died young and left an ugly, bloated corpse.

— Matthew Oshinsky

ALSO OPENING THIS WEEKEND

BANDIDAS
PG-13, 95 minutes

In turn-of-the-century Mexico, a rough-and-tumble, idealistic peasant and a sophisticated heiress (Salma Hayek and Penelope Cruz) reluctantly join forces to become a bank-robbing duo in an effort to combat a ruthless enforcer terrorizing their town.

FEAST
R, 95 minutes

When a diverse group of strangers — including Clerks’ Jason Mewes and former punk Henry Rollins — find themselves trapped in an isolated tavern, they must band together in a battle for survival against a family of flesh-hungry creatures that lay siege. “Feast” is the winning film from the hit series “Project Greenlight,” created by Matt Damon, Ben Affleck, and Chris Moore.

— Staff Reporter of the Sun