South By So Much Punk

Good Vibrations

SXSW 2013 FILM

• Gettin' Busy

  The South by Southwest Film Festival means everybody has a full plate

  BY MONICA RIESE

• Home Movie

  Joss Whedon follows 'Avengers' with a Shakespearean labor of love filmed at his house

  BY ROBERT FAIRES

• Kathleen Hanna Kills It

  'The Punk Singer' turns up the volume on Riot Grrrl pioneer's passion, politics, and devastating illness

  BY AUDRA SCHROEDER

• South By So Much Punk

  Pussy Riot, 'The Punk Syndrome,' and – count 'em – two docs about Green Day: Yep, punk is having a moment in the movies

  BY AUDRA SCHROEDER

• Queer Culture From the 1970s to 70

  Three documentaries highlight a generation of gay icons

  BY ANDY CAMPBELL

• You Can't Always Get What You Want

  Yen Tan's 'Pit Stop' finds humanity in transaction

  BY BRANDON WATSON

• Play Along With Busy Actor Bingo

  Mark a tile once you've seen the actor in at least two films

  BY MONICA RIESE

• Air Sex in the Name of Love

  Bryan Poyser's 'The Bounceback' strives to strike a balance between comedy and emotion

  BY DAN SOLOMON

• Around the World in Eight Films

  Cultural snapshots give viewers something to write home about

  BY JESSI CAPE

• Traveling Road Show

  Archivist Rick Prelinger debuts an interactive ode to America in moving pictures

  BY LEAH CHURNER

• Celluloid Icons

  The larger-than-life John Milius and the enigmatic, introverted Harry Dean Stanton come into focus

  BY SHAWN BADGLEY

• You're Next, AJ Bowen

  Local actor shares his SXSW with a teen rom-com and a brutal thriller

  BY RICHARD WHITTAKER

• Liberty and Justice

  Michael Morton tells Al Reinert his story of wrongful conviction and 25 years behind bars

  BY JORDAN SMITH

• What Goes Around ...

  With 'Some Girl(s)', Neil LaBute circles back from stage to screen

  BY ROBERT FAIRES

• Nerd Wars

  'Zero Charisma' and the social costs of geekdom

  BY DAN SOLOMON

• Lovely Freda Responds Discreetly

  The Beatles' longtime secretary takes center stage

  BY ANNE S. LEWIS

There's a wealth of punk docs at SXSW this year, spanning the 40-year existence of the genre and spotlighting a few international scenes. A spiritual sister to The Punk Singer, Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer documents six months in the life of three Pussy Riot members who were sentenced to seven years in prison after performing a punk prayer, later deemed an act of "hooliganism," in a Moscow church in February 2012. We most often saw images of the three women – Maria Alyokhina, Yekaterina Samutsevich, and Nadezhda Tolokonnikova – behind bars or glass, or on trial. Directors Mike Lerner and Maxim Pozdorovkin take the time to get each woman's backstory, and give us a sense of Russia's feminist and activist history.

Over in Finland, The Punk Syndrome follows the four members of the band Pertti Kurikan Nimipäivät, each of whom is developmentally disabled. They sing about the classic punk themes – hatred of rules, the plight of being misunderstood – and the film is a nice balance of humor and pathos, as we look into their day-to-day lives.

The Belfast punk scene of the late Seventies is the focus of biopic Good Vibrations, the diary of glass-eyed madman Terri Hooley (Richard Dormer) and his record store, Good Vibrations. He later started a label of the same name, releasing bands like the Undertones and shaping Belfast's musical community at a time when political conflict paralyzed Northern Ireland. Dormer's embodiment of Hooley's idealism and manic optimism is spot-on.

Detroit trio Death – brothers David, Bobby, and Dannis Hackney – bypassed the R&B of their hometown and embraced political punk in the early Seventies, providing the connective tissue for bands yet to come. They get the doc treatment with A Band Called Death, tracing their rediscovery via the Internet generation and their gripping family history (the Hackney brothers were preacher's sons, which no doubt informed their rhetoric).

Does the world need two separate Green Day documentaries? Probably not, but nevertheless they exist and make their debut at SXSW. Broadway Idiot follows singer Billie Joe Armstrong's unlikely ascent from mainstream punk commodity to Broadway star with the musical American Idiot; ¡Cuatro! captures the 2012 studio recording of albums ¡Uno!, ¡Dos!, and ¡Tré!, as the band tries to recapture the magic after American Idiot's international success.

See sxsw.com/film for film showtimes.