Green Room

Being in pol­i­tics today isn’t about being a good per­son, it’s about con­vinc­ing the world of that fact. This is achiev­able through time hon­oured grit and deter­mi­na­tion, or actu­al­ly being a nat­u­ral­ly enlight­ened soul who has ideas and is able to com­mu­ni­cate them to a broad, appre­cia­tive audi­ence. Oth­er­wise, you can linger behind a smoke­screen where self-image and pub­lic per­cep­tion will always trump real substance.

Jere­my Saulnier’s deter­mi­nate­ly nasty Green Room is about the insane lengths that some polit­i­cal move­ments will go to pre­serve some sem­blance of cred­i­bil­i­ty, even when they have less-than-noth­ing going for them to start with. A neo-Nazi enclave work­ing under the cov­er of an out-of-the-way punk venue strug­gle to con­vince the world that they’re just mis­un­der­stood soft­ies want­i­ng to dis­tance them­selves from past PR snafus.

The group is led by the guru-like Dar­cy Banker (Patrick Stew­art), a manip­u­la­tor, a big-pic­ture play­er attempt­ing to cor­ral the hot-head­ed ver­min of his brood into a respectable move­ment. Their rank­ing sys­tem is based on the colour of shoelaces, usu­al­ly thread­ed onto the type of knee-high Doc Martens used to stomp faces into a bloody pulp. A peri­od of tran­quil­i­ty comes to an abrupt end when a young inductee gets bru­tal­ly stabbed, and there just hap­pens to be a band pass­ing through on tour who wit­ness every­thing. What begins as just a very uncom­fort­able night on the sched­ule turns into a night­mare cov­er-up sce­nario where death becomes an inevitability.

The writer/director’s pre­vi­ous film, Blue Ruin, was praised for its terse, down-and-dirty treat­ment of thriller genre mechan­ics, and he’s bop­ping to the same beat with this new one. He estab­lish­es char­ac­ters, marks outs the play­ing field, and pret­ty soon we have a punk rock­ers ver­sus tooled-up neo-Nazis sce­nario, the bolt­ed door of the epony­mous green room the pre­car­i­ous igni­tion pin that’s pre­vent­ing the whole place from blow­ing. The audi­ence is par­ty to both sides of the door, so we see how the band (the good­ies), led by Anton Yelchin, plot their unlike­ly escape, and we see the neo-Nazis (the bad­dies) do their utmost to make sure this dark secret nev­er gets out.

It’s all put togeth­er with great skill, but nev­er quite man­ages to deliv­er more than its mod­est, stripped-back sto­ry will allow. Even the sur­pris­es ring a lit­tle hol­low, fold­ed into the action to self-con­scious­ly spice things up rather than to add any emo­tion­al res­o­nance. But per­haps the film is more effec­tive as an anti Nazi screed, mock­ing their delu­sions of grandeur and sin­cere belief that their pol­i­tics have mass-mar­ket poten­tial. The film’s most chill­ing aspect is Banker’s emi­nent­ly cool organ­i­sa­tion skills – he deliv­ers orders to his min­ions like he was either wait­ing for this to hap­pen, or it has hap­pened many times before.

Green Room is about how mod­ern pol­i­tics is the process of avert­ing a cri­sis. An impromp­tu encore shout out goes to British actress Imo­gen Poots as a dis­traught, pan­da-eyed skin who defects to the punks when she wit­ness­es what her pals are real­ly all about.