Good lord. Hollywood always gets punk wrong. I accept that. As a matter of fact, I kind of like that they always get it wrong. I love crazed weirdos running wild in the streets, breaking bottles over their heads, harassing innocent old ladies, brandishing switchblades, and generally being misunderstood misanthropes (or some such thing). It’s these wildly inaccurate depictions of punks that got me interested in it in the first place. I have no problem with that kind of misrepresentation, but this kind, the kind in CBGB, I take offense to.
First a little back story. CBGB was a bar and music venue opened by a guy named Hilly Kristal in New York City in 1973. Originally a biker and country music bar—CBGB stands for “Country Blue Grass and Blues”—it eventually became the home of the emerging punk rock scene. Bands like The Ramones, Talking Heads, Television, Blondie, and The Dead Boys all got their starts at CBGB. The film covers these early days, with terrible lip-synced performances by actors attempting to capture the attitude and urgency of the late 70s punk scene. They do no succeed.
CBGB founder, Hilly Kristal, is portrayed by none other than the late Alan Rickman, whose performance would be fine if it were a deleted scene from Harry Potter in which Severus Snape downs a bottle of sleeping pills in a suicide attempt. There are even a few scenes where he gets to interact with his old pal Ron Weasley (Rupert Grint), in the form of a surprisingly adequate rendition of Cheetah Chrome of The Dead Boys. The other performances might as well have not even been there. In fact, the film could have easily consisted of a Spotify playlist of the songs by the original bands that are featured. Wigs on mannequins could have stood in for the actors. There’s a good chance no one would have noticed. To make things worse, director and writer Randall Miller decides to take us on pointless side adventures, such as the sound engineer being very pleased by the new boots he bought, or Kristal visiting the old family farm. Utterly pointless! And don’t get me started on the comic book motif.
I can’t imagine that anyone without prior knowledge of who everyone is would be able to make heads or tails of CBGB. I had the good fortune of knowing the real-life stories of almost all the characters in the film, making it a bit easier to piece things together. Without this prior knowledge, however, I fear that no amount of title cards telling us who everyone is—and what band they’re in—would help the uninitiated make heads or tails of the story. Not only that, but the film manages to make a very exciting time in American music history bland and boring. The songs are great, but all the life is sucked right out of them. Seeing fake Iggy Pop steal the microphone from fake Debbie Harry made me want to throw up. I couldn’t wait to get home to my record collection and offer the butchered songs some redemption.
This may seem petty, but I also had big problems with the set decoration. The bar was littered with flyers and stickers of bands that didn’t exist when the film takes place. Every time I saw that Youth of Today poster, I cringed.
I cannot recommend this movie to anyone. I suspect that the punk fans will be the most offended by it. I understand the desire to tell the story of CBGB, but I can’t imagine how it managed to be told with such a lack of flavor. I kept thinking to myself “I understand why, but why this?”
James is a writer, skateboarder, record collector, wrestling nerd, and tabletop gamer living with his family in Asheville, North Carolina. He is a member of the Southeastern Film Critics Association, the North Carolina Film Critics Association, and contributes to The Daily Orca, Razorcake Magazine, Mountain Xpress, and Asheville Movies.