Synopsis
The Los Angeles punk music scene circa 1980 is the focus of this film. With Alice Bag Band, Black Flag, Catholic Discipline, Circle Jerks, Fear, Germs, and X.
Your Movie Library
Cast
- Eugene TatuSelf
- Alice BagSelf
- Claude BessySelf
- Dinah CancerSelf
- Exene CervenkaSelf
- Lorna DoomSelf
- Darby CrashSelf
- Don BollesSelf
- Philo CramerSelf
- John DoeSelf
Recommendations
- 100
The New York Times
A shrewd and engrossing documentary even for audiences who have absolutely no patience for the music it includes. - 100
Rolling Stone
The performance footage alone makes this worthy of study by musicologists and historians. There are too many great scenes to mention. - 100
Variety
A bracing, stimulating and technically superb close-up look at the LA punk scene, pic is pitched at a perfect distance to allow for simultaneous engagement in the music and spectacle, and for rueful contemplation of what it all might mean. - 100
Slate
The Decline of Western Civilization is the finest cinematic distillation of punk ever made, not simply as music but as ethos. Featuring performances by X, the Germs, Black Flag, and the Circle Jerks, the film is frantic, caustic, electric, imbued with all the rage and love of a pogoing teen throwing punches at his friends. - 100
Washington Post
The Decline . . . of Western Civilization is a bracing primer to just about anything one might want to know about the hard-core punk scene. At the same time, it's remarkably evenhanded, making no judgment on the musical or social standards of the movement. Director Penelope Spheeris neither champions, patronizes nor condescends to the participants' stylized fury. The result is a film that will appeal equally to the furious and the curious, assuming that both enter the arena with an open mind. [10 Nov 1981, p.D2] - 100
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
A movie so pungent and filled with sweaty intensity that you can practically smell the rank body odour of the film's subjects as they hurl their bodies against each other in a frenzy of aggression or perform as if in a trance, soaked with perspiration. - 80
Chicago Reader
The live sets by X, Black Flag, the Circle Jerks, the Germs, and Fear, recorded between December 1979 and May 1980, still thunder after all these years; unfortunately so do the scene's racism, queer baiting, and utter despair. - 70
Time Out
It's far from unmissable, but it's valuable rock history with some great noise.
