We’ve crossed the halfway mark of the year, and we continue to expand our list of recommended films where punk intersects the plot in some way, whether directly or indirectly. For July, I selected a classic that people wouldn’t stop recommending about one of the most important bands in history, a piece from punk cinema legend Alex Cox featuring a music legend as the protagonist, a midlife drama about the quest to escape routine, and two films where sports and true stories cross paths of glory and darkness.
Don’t forget to subscribe to receive these recommendations in your email every month.
Previous recommendations:
2025 | January | February | March | April | May | June
Lords of Dogtown (2005) Directed by Catherine Hardwicke
Written by Stacy Peralta, the film portrays the birth of modern skateboarding in 1970s California through the true story of the Z-Boys, a group of teenagers from broken homes who transferred the aggressiveness of surfing to the neighborhood’s empty swimming pools. The movie perfectly balances the adrenaline of street tricks with a subtle critique of how the corporate industry devoured the authenticity of a subculture to turn it into a million-dollar sport. By moving away from cheap glorification, the film nostalgically captures the pain of the end of innocence and the fraying of childhood friendships in the face of sudden fame.
Kelly & Cal (2014) | Directed by Jen McGowan
Kelly has just become a mother and is living the kind of life she once swore she would never have: a house in the suburbs, a husband with a good job, days measured by the baby’s naps. Almost nothing remains of her phase as a member of a punk band, save for the feeling that at some point she lost her way. The routine breaks when she meets Cal, the teenager next door, who was left in a wheelchair after an accident and faces this new life with a sharp humor and quite a bit of built-up resentment. The closeness between the two grows quickly and in a way that discomforts both Kelly and those around her: it is neither a romance nor a conventional friendship, but something in between that reactivates questions in her about who she was before becoming a wife and mother.
Straight to Hell (1987) Directed by Alex Cox
Willy, Simms, and Norwood are a trio of outlaws who fall asleep the morning of an important job and ruin it completely. To make matters worse, that very night they rob a bank in a hurry, partly to escape their boss’s fury, and end up stranded in the desert when the car runs out of gas. There they discover a ghost town taken over by a family of cowboys with a very strange addiction to coffee. Alex Cox filmed all of this in Almería in just three weeks, with a script written in three days and a cast assembled almost by chance: Joe Strummer, Courtney Love, Elvis Costello, Dennis Hopper, The Pogues, and Circle Jerks. It shows in every scene that there wasn’t much of a plan behind it; what remains is a gathering of friends playing at making a western, rather than a film with structure, and that lack of control ends up being what gives the movie its special touch.
The Great Rock ‘n’ Roll Swindle (1980) | Directed by Julien Temple
Malcolm McLaren, the manager of the Sex Pistols, puts together a farce tailored entirely to his own measure here: a film that tells, with total cynicism, how he manufactured and sold the most famous punk band in the world. Temple mixes animation, live concerts, and a frayed narrative of the group’s breakup; though it purports to be a documentary, it is nothing more than a bizarre comedy from a chaotic era. The Pistols do not appear as lucid rock stars but as puppets in a publicity stunt that works out perfectly for McLaren. It is a film that is intentionally messy and made with the exact same logic of the scam it portrays.
The Basketball Diaries (1995) | Directed by Scott Kalvert
Based on the memoirs of Jim Carroll, a poet and musician who as a kid was a high school basketball prospect in New York before falling into heroin. Kalvert films that descent without pulling punches: the court, which should be the way out, ends up being merely the starting point of the street. The film is sustained above all by the rawness of its atmosphere and by a still very young Leonardo DiCaprio who goes all out in the role.
To see the full list of recommendations and to find out where to watch them in your region, subscribe to my Letterboxd
If you like what I do and want to support me, subscribe to my Ko-fi.
No posts
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.