Thanks, I Hate It: Green Room

Here's a movie I should love. Patrick Stewart playing against type as a dead-eyed father figure to a backwoods Washington state white supremacist movement? Savage, desperate ultraviolence? Punks versus Nazis at a scummy boots-and-bracers music venue? Instead I walked out of the theater feeling like I'd swallowed a bad oyster. The A24-standard blue-green color palette, the ultra-gory absurdity of it taken somberly at face value, the paper-thin characters and mumbled dialogue -- it all feels dreadfully mismatched. 

Green Room's chief problem is that it doesn't understand what it means to be punk. The apartments where the Ain't Rights crash in the movie's opening are devoid of heaped laundry and unwashed plates, the handbills on their walls rendered lifeless by the surrounding tidiness. The camera is clean and unhurried, much of the costuming insufficiently aged and scuffed. There's no sense of urgency even to its most desperately violent scenes, no grime to any of it, really. These people are bathed. The air of poverty the film attempts to foster around them comes off as faintly ridiculous.

Total verisimilitude isn't necessary to make a good movie. I don't think anyone would argue that Ken Russell's The Devils is a factually accurate portrait of life during the plague. Still, the spirit of the subject has to come through in some way, and at this Green Room fails completely. Its self-seriousness undercuts its trashy appeal and vice versa, resulting in a tasteless collage of sterile images. There is no insight into the deeply divided and contentious punk music scene, no rebellious instinct echoed anywhere in visuals or dialogue. Even the Ain't Rights' cover of Dead Kennedys classic 'Nazi Punks Fuck Off' feels brittle and stilted.

Stewart is the movie's sole real attraction. As skinhead Darcy Banker he's a coldly believable surrogate father to a legion of boys lost to the world. Every time he steps on screen you can feel more about the lives of the young men around him than the script ever actually delivers, the depth of their loneliness, frustration, and isolation that led them to fight like dogs for this psychopath's approval. It's incredible, but it's not enough to sustain the rest of the movie or its insistence on taking its lurid brutality as seriously as a documentary on violence among white nationalist youths. It's trash in denial, which is the worst thing trash can be.