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BRUCE McDONALD PAINTS A DARK BUT VIVID PORTRAIT OF ONE BAND'S WAVERING DEVOTION TO ITS PUNK IDENTITY IN HIS STIRRING MOCKUMENTARY "HARD CORE LOGO." BY ANDREW O'HEHIR | Since it's a mock documentary about a semilegendary Canadian punk band on the comeback trail, Bruce McDonald's remarkable "Hard Core Logo" is already being viewed as the 1977 generation's answer to "This Is Spinal Tap," a film whose immense popularity long ago overwhelmed whatever ironic bite it may once have had. But while "Spinal Tap" was essentially an affectionate spoof aimed at the elephantine pomposity of mid-'70s rock, "Hard Core Logo," as befits its subject and settings, is a darker and more acrid work. Perhaps because the particular brand of macho punk rebellion it parodies took itself so seriously and was so fatally compromised, McDonald's movie (adapted by screenwriter Noel S. Baker from a novel by Michael Turner) is in the end considerably closer to tragedy than farce. "Hard Core Logo" is more than a clever film, although it certainly is that. It's also a visually exciting and surprisingly affecting one. The central conflict between front man Joe Dick (Hugh Dillon) and guitarist Billy Tallent (Callum Keith Rennie), inseparable boyhood friends (à la Mick Jagger and Keith Richards) who have grown up into a growling punk ideologue and a would-be pop star, respectively (à la Joe Strummer and Mick Jones of the Clash), is of course the stuff of rock 'n' roll archetype. But it has rarely, if ever, been portrayed so convincingly -- you know the whole time that the reunion of the boorish, overbearing, yet undeniably charismatic Joe and the sweet-tempered, profoundly passive-aggressive Billy can only end badly, but completely against your better judgment, you like these guys and want things to work out for them somehow. If you spent as much time as I did pursuing the so-called alternative culture of the late '70s and early '80s, you'll find in the itchy, jittery, vérité-style images of "Hard Core Logo" a startlingly accurate reminder of all those long, dreary nights when you took bad drugs, put on that bad leather jacket and tried to look tough in some freezing (or perhaps sweltering) former Chinese restaurant while a handful of assholes with guitars staggered around a tiny stage drinking Yukon Jack from the bottle and calling you names. I can't think of a movie that more effectively captures the low-rent alt-rock lifestyle of those storied pre-Nirvana days: the endless hangovers, chain smoking, fluorescent-lit diners and long, empty van rides, not to mention the constant macho strutting and posturing and a level of matter-of-course sexism otherwise only encountered on Fraternity Row. And of course this was all not simply in the service of art (which is a bad enough reason) -- it was political. But "Hard Core Logo" also captures something deeper and more ineffable than the realistic texture of punk existence. Most of us gradually, and perhaps painfully, had to accept that our revolution was to be no more successful than that of the preceding hippie generation we claimed to despise, and that the evil corporate society -- to the extent it existed at all -- had happily absorbed everything we could throw at it and would swallow us and all our surviving friends in due course. If we were lucky, we got out without becoming neocons or born-again Christians, and we can look back on those nights with more fondness than chagrin, remembering the intoxicating sense of community we temporarily forged. From Shelley and Rimbaud to Kurt Cobain and Joe Dick, however, some young soul rebels have been unable to face the moment when their cherished identities as revolutionary wastrels begin to seem ridiculous, when their fans, friends and colleagues begin to drift away into bourgeois adulthood. Supposedly the most famous punk band ever to emerge from Vancouver, Hard Core Logo seem to be a composite of many dubious musical units of their era. Along with that undeniable hint of the Clash (what exactly are Strummer and Jones doing these days?), there's a heavy dose of the West Coast anarchist hardcore scene centered on bands like Black Flag and the Dead Kennedys, which often blended anti-imperialist rhetoric with crass pussyhounding: The HCL "discography" -- published in a hilarious faux-zine handed out as the press kit -- includes both the EP "U.S. Out of North America" and the song "Blondes Have More Cum." And there are almost certainly traces of a real Vancouver band called 54/40, underground darlings of the early '80s who released one major-label album before disappearing. Hard Core Logo's 13-year career screeched to a halt in 1991, after eight indie records and 1,000-plus shows, when be-Mohawked Joe pissed in the Sire Records president's drink during a New York gig. Joe has bummed around Vancouver for five years while babe-magnet Billy has fruitlessly sucked up to the L.A. corporate rock machine. Bass player John Oxenberger (John Pyper-Ferguson), a literary-minded former mental patient, and bearlike drummer Pipefitter (Bernie Coulson) have retreated into more or less normal lives, but Joe isn't content to leave them there. His rock mentor, an aging punk pioneer named Bucky Haight -- a rock recluse in the vein of Syd Barrett and Alex Chilton -- has reportedly been shot in Saskatchewan, losing one or perhaps two legs, and Joe convinces the other Hard Cores to reunite for a one-night Rock Against Guns benefit in a Vancouver ballroom. (In the time-honored mockumentary tradition, the producers convinced DOA and other genuine West Coast punk bands to play alongside the spurious HCL, and even elicited a cameo from Joey Ramone.) When the concert is a tremendous success, Joe convinces Billy and the gang to hit the road for a five-city swing through western Canada. While I can't say that the Hard Core Logo brand of blues-inflected thrash does a lot for me, their live shows in the film are completely plausible and professional, and they definitely rock. For Joe this tour reunites him with the only partner who ever mattered to him; for Billy it's a momentary detour on the road to the guitar-shaped pool in Beverly Hills. "There's different ways of looking at this," Joe muses to the camera during a rest stop. (McDonald actually becomes a character in his own film, since the fiction is that he's tagging along to record the tour.) "Billy wants the models and limousines; I'm happy with hookers and taxicabs." In a series of arresting and increasingly hallucinatory vignettes on the road from Calgary to Regina to Winnipeg to Saskatoon, things go from merely pathetic to truly desperate: Joe starts doing so much blow he doesn't sleep, Billy negotiates with a trendoid L.A. pop band called Jenifur (who are featured on the cover of Spin) behind Joe's back, John loses his medication and begins to melt down and even the unflappable Pipefitter nearly breaks his leg falling through a hole in the van's floor. Clubs close down while the band is en route, a pair of Joe's hookers steal their money and they arrive at Bucky Haight's farm to discover that the former leader of the seminal San Francisco punk band Nazis in the White House is, mysteriously, up and walking on two legs. Bucky convinces the visiting Hard Cores to ingest some powerful acid, and it's at this point especially that "Hard Core Logo" breaks free of burlesque. McDonald's representation of the acid trip at once parodies a movie convention (seen at its most ludicrous in Oliver Stone's "The Doors") and captures the psychotropic state in vivid, original detail. As McDonald and his collaborators -- most of them veterans of the Canadian punk scene -- make abundantly clear in this memorable film, the adolescent dream of rebellion that fueled bands like Hard Core Logo retains a powerful allure. But in that state of dazed post-LSD lucidity, as the tour spirals to a disastrous conclusion in Edmonton, Joe and Billy begin to see themselves (and their complicated, passionate relationship) with awful clarity. They are men nearing middle age who have thrown away their lives on a boyhood fantasy; if they can't free themselves from it, it will devour them. SALON | Nov. 13, 1998 Andrew O'Hehir is a frequent contributor to Salon.