The Punk Singer

“Girls to the front!” Kathleen Hanna used to call from the stage, stopping songs to confront and disperse tough-guy male fans at Bikini Kill concerts. Just as loudly, the Riot Grrrl movement that she co-founded asserted space, an equal claim, for women in the male-dominated US hardcore punk-rock scene, and started right in its heartland, Washington DC.

This is an insightful, personal and entertaining documentary and was OK'ed by Hanna herself, Sini Anderson said, partly because of a disappointing tendency for feminist art to just disappear. Unfairly labelled hagiography by some critics, this represents a celebration of a relentlessly outspoken feminist voice and, together with her collaborators (several of whom contribute to the film), a hugely influential force on the '90s US underground music scene.

This film traces Hanna’s life from her first, already strident forays into performance art as a teenager, delivering furious performance poetry in coffee shops, through art school, co-producing zines and building a bold peer group through various bands and solo projects. The film takes a sad, abrupt shift at Hanna’s surprise late-diagnosis with lyme disease. From then on we see how her remaining energies have been directed away from music to campaigning for the government to acknowledge lyme disease as a real issue. Almost ignored by mainstream media, it's claimed that lyme disease is actually of epidemic proportions in the US.

Sini Anderson described Hanna’s aesthetic as making her “a kind of Jackie O of punk-rock” and her glam/aggro personality runs like an electric current through the movie, eloquent in speech and an irrepressible force onstage. At her most extreme, she mixed a bratty ‘valley girl’ vocal delivery with an ironized, aggressive sexuality, manifest both visually and lyrically. Early inspirations such as Joan Jett and Kim Gordon offer praise and perspective, as do her collaborators in the Riot Grrrl movement. Yet it’s the astounding, previously-unseen archive footage of Bikini Kill, her first professional band, whose raw energy surprises the most, still vital twenty years on. Her later group, the more sophisticated and successful electroclash outfit Le Tigre, also feature significantly. Together with stories of her friendships from the early days of Riot Grrrl, it’s the live music that forms the heart of the film.

Well-known events given new focus here include her impact on the lives of friend Kurt Cobain (coining the phrase ‘smells like teen spirit’) and husband Adam Horowitz of Beastie Boys, giving clues to his band’s mid-career u-turn from frat-rap jokers to right-thinking global artists. Hopefully this film will draw more people in to appreciate the glorious noise that Hanna and her third-wave feminist contemporaries made to bring about the changes that they did.

The Punk Singer was shown as part of the DocHouse year-round documentary festival and, like many of their screenings, was followed by a director Q&A.