Kill Your Idols

Filmmaker S.A. Crary shares a complex history of New York’s art-punk scene. This compelling documentary weaves together a timeline for an aggressive movement allowing the players to reflect in the moment.

With interviews from such punk rock icons as Teenage Jesus & the Jerks bassist Jim Sclavunos, bandmate Lydia Lunch, DNA’s Arto Lindsay, Glenn Branca, Sonic Youth and others from the late ‘70s/early ‘80s art-punk explosion.

Exclusive interviews with these originators and a new generation of practitioners – from the Grammy-nominated Yeah Yeah Yeahs to Black Dice to Liars to Gogol Bordello – reveals a consistent hunger for invention through subversion, motivations that come into cacophonous focus in the new and archival concert footage bridging the interviews.

What also comes out is a depth of retrospection amongst the older generation that puts the younger generation’s musings in a context that will surprise even the most plugged-in of scenesters. By documenting art-punk in the same spirit as the movement itself has played out, Crary has created a compelling reference for a movement that defies them and managed to stay true to its spirit in the process.