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The Washington, D.C., punk scene documented in Scott Crawford's Salad Days was a hydra of privileged brattiness, tough-guy posturing, earnest disaffection and lofty purpose. It was, as youth movements tend to be, loud and ungainly, beautiful and frustrating, political even when it wasn't trying to be. It was messy. Although Salad Days does a fine job of taking viewers on a superficial tour of the adolescent and then post-adolescent and then post-post-adolescent growing pains and pleasures of D.C. hardcore's '80s evolution, Crawford, a veteran of the scene himself, too often dodges the era's awkwardness, opting instead for a glossy, yearbook-style nostalgia trip.
Which would be OK if Salad Days were intended for neophytes who are ambivalent about which side of the Faith/Void split album is superior, but Crawford's film is instead aimed at those of us who memorized the Minor Threat discography decades ago. Yes, it is thrilling to see grainy clips of young people bashing out some of the 20th century's most vital music, and it's amusing to watch Ian MacKaye gripe about his legacy as straight edge's reluctant inventor. But we have YouTube. We have Spotify. And we have countless other documentaries in which Henry Rollins blesses us with a stressed monologue. Been there done that.
What we don't have—or not enough of—are music documentaries that land their time machines in rough patches. Salad Days
only dips its toe into choppy water just often enough to make us wish
it would dive in already. Crawford brushes against some problematic
tidbits: that D.C.'s hardcore scene was created by sons of capital
privilege in a city known for its murder rate or that the celebrated
(and maligned) mid-'80s lurch into groovier music was inspired by D.C.'s
mostly black go-go movement. This is important stuff, sure, but it's
also just factually interesting. If rockumentaries like Salad Days want to match the vitality of their subjects, they need to dig a little deeper, get a little messy.
Critic's Grade: B-
SEE IT: Salad Days opens Friday at the Kiggins Theatre.
WWeek 2015