Green Room – first look review

For any­one who’s ever hit the road with some friends and a boot-full of beat­en up instru­ments, Green Room will car­ry a spe­cial res­o­nance. Liv­ing hand to mouth, show to show, play­ing for change in dive bars in shitheel town after shitheel town, with any luck plug­ging the gaps in your loose­ly sketched route by grate­ful­ly slot­ting into ran­dom bills. For many it’s a short-lived yet essen­tial rite of pas­sage, a for­ma­tive peri­od of self-dis­cov­ery through con­scious nonconformity.

Jere­my Saulnier’s fol­low-up to Blue Ruin – which took home the FIPRESCI Prize at Director’s Fort­night in 2013 – sets out its stall as a nos­tal­gia-tinged ode to being in a band as a rest­less twen­tysome­thing and believ­ing uncon­di­tion­al­ly in every­thing that band stands for. In the case of hard­core punk four-piece Ain’t Rights, their DIY ide­al­ism is as well-worn as the fad­ed Minor Threat t‑shirt worn by Anton Yelchin’s bass play­er, Pat.

He and fel­low band mem­bers Sam (Alia Shawkat), Reece (Joe Cole) and Tiger (Cal­lum Turn­er) earn their scen­ester stripes when they rock up to a seclud­ed boots-and-braces bar and pro­ceed to launch into a full-blood­ed ren­di­tion of ​‘Nazi Punks Fuck Off’ by Dead Kennedys. It’s a moment of sear­ing inten­si­ty met with snarling hos­til­i­ty by the res­i­dent skin­heads. As Ain’t Rights tear through their set the spit and suds con­tin­ue to fly, the knife-edge ten­sion cut­ting through the sludgy bass, thrash­ing pow­er chords and splin­tered vocals.

Then the music stops.

To reveal any­thing about what hap­pens next would be to spoil the fun. Let’s just say the band’s rid­er isn’t the only thing that’s swift­ly dis­patched in the epony­mous back­stage area. With the film’s bait and switch com­plete, Saulnier wastes no time in shift­ing through the gears like a box­cut­ter through but­ter, all the while keep­ing the audi­ence con­fined to this cramped, win­dow­less punk bunker. It’s an inge­nious use of set­ting and space – the inci­den­tal heavy music and scuzzy décor height­en­ing the sense of dread that per­me­ates every inch of the venue.

The cast­ing is equal­ly strong: Patrick Stew­art (chan­nelling his inner Heisen­berg) plays against type to qui­et­ly men­ac­ing effect as the venue pro­pri­etor; there’s a brief but mem­o­rable show­ing from Blue Ruin’s Macon Blair as a white pow­er lacky fac­ing a cri­sis of faith; and Imo­gen Poots ditch­es her whole­some girl-next-door look for a Ben Sher­man shirt, green bomber jack­et and Chelsea haircut.

Saulnier might have been tempt­ed to add a sub­lay­er of social com­men­tary here – per­haps some­thing con­cern­ing Amer­i­can gun cul­ture or the media stig­ma­ti­sa­tion of cer­tain music and youth sub­cul­tures – but this is a lean, unde­mand­ing pop­corn movie and bet­ter for it. At times it feels like too clean a kill, as if Saulnier has set out to remind us of the flair and resource­ful­ness that pre­vi­ous­ly marked him as an excit­ing new voice while oper­at­ing safe­ly (though not rigid­ly) with­in the con­ven­tions of genre filmmaking.

Green Room, then, is a styl­ish and riotous­ly enter­tain­ing work, but not a marked pro­gres­sion in career terms. Hav­ing seem­ing­ly found his groove in the low-bud­get back­woods of Amer­i­can indie cin­e­ma, it will be very inter­est­ing to see where Saulnier goes from here.