A great, girly punk rock classic that’s left a deeper mark than anyone ever expected. In 1982, it barely saw release after blisteringly poor reactions from test audiences, which sounds right for a film that offers such flawed heroes. Its logic is a pissed-off teenage girl’s logic. 17-year-old Diane Lane’s mother is freshly dead from lung cancer, her town is a bore and she got fired from her fry cook job on live television for being too mouthy in front of a news crew. She’s smart, but still has a lot to learn, like any other teenager. She’s not brilliant or particularly clever or very likable to the people around her. Maybe someday she’ll be an interesting artist, but for now she’s getting exercise treating the rest of the world as her punching bag.
Sounds like a good punk rock frontwoman to me.
She’s the singer of The Stains. Her sister and cousin provide the guitar and bass. No drums. No songs, either. The group’s best one is someone else’s, ex-Sex Pistols’ Steve Jones and Paul Cook’s ironic establishment anthem “Join the Professionals”, which plays several times in different versions here. Their second best is a primitive ode to self-deprecation called “I’m a Waste of Time” that’s a perfect theme for The Stains’ trainwreck live performances. The group is less an outlet for a musical vision as it is for Lane’s angry energy, which flies out in rants to the crowd even when the rest of her band get scared off the stage. It’s that personality, not their music, that makes The Stains a sensation among a legion of other sad girls. All the while, the band still have no idea what they’re doing.
And the film loves them for it. What the rest of the world sees as missteps, the film sees as charm and honesty. There are bands in real life who are happy to sound as naked, fumbling and yearning as The Stains do in their early performances. As The Stains become better, the film actually becomes LESS interested in their music and more into the back-and-forth reactions of a fickle audience and the pitfalls, parasites and personality changes of sudden success.
After all, a popular rock band is in some ways often the product of a lot of bad decisions that magically, and usually temporarily, went right. Something was compromised. Somebody was cheated. Someone whom no one would ever advise to go on stage found themselves there. Seen it before, gonna see it again. See it here as made in the 80s, when punk rock was still weird, dangerous and one of the loudest voices there was for the marginalized.
You might expect the director to be a young hothead, but nope: it’s Lou Adler, an old hand in the music business whose career goes back to the 1950s as a songwriter and the 60s when he was the President of Dunhill Records during its Mamas and the Papas heyday. Adler became a player in the film business when he bought the screen rights to the The Rocky Horror Picture Show. His directing credits add up to a whopping two movies: Cheech and Chong’s debut vehicle Up in Smoke and this. Meanwhile, screenwriter Nancy Dowd had an Academy Award to her name for Coming Home and credits on the likes of Slap Shot and Saturday Night Live. Still, she took on the pseudonym of “Rob Morton” for this project.