Hard Core Logo.

Hard Core Logo was the first DVD I ever bought.

I had already seen the movie numerous times on VHS, rented and renewed from the Blockbuster in my college town, because the good video store, the indie video store, had lost their copy.

I watched it by myself in my tiny on-campus apartment bedroom, late afternoon creeping into evening. When it was over, I took a few minutes to gather my thoughts and then did a few things, in rapid succession: I rewound the tape, I hit play, I watched the movie all over again.

(The only other movie I've done that with, before or since, was Adam Wingard's The Guest.)

When Hard Core Logo was over the second time, I emerged from my room to a quiet and dark living room. With four roommates and their significant others usually around, this was rare. And eerie. I felt as though I was moving through a fog, dazed and stunned, certain moments of the movie replaying themselves in my mind. What did I just watch? All I wanted to do was talk about it, and no one was around.

I called my boyfriend, who lived two apartments away. I made us dinner and we ate in my room, plates balanced on our legs, and I rewound the tape and hit play again.

"Holy shit," he said, as the credits started. "You watched that three times? Today?"

I nodded.

"Why?"

I remember thinking my answer was too corny to say out loud, so I shrugged. I should have said what I was thinking.

I was looking for answers.

"I think you need to get out of this room," he told me.

We spent the rest of the night with friends, the lot of them playing a drinking game with homemade sake and Iron Chef. It was boisterous and high-spirited, and I felt miles away.

Hard Core Logo, at its most barebones, is about a punk band that reunites after a five-year break. They reassemble for a benefit show, followed by a small tour, and the film is a visual record of their time on the road.

There's a line pondered out by John Oxenberger, bass player and the only member of the band without an alias. "Joe Dick," he says, naming the lead singer, "Billy Tallent," and then, the lead guitarist, "guys who picked their own names when they were fourteen." How do middle-aged men grapple with versions of themselves they created when they were kids? What if you outgrow your ideal version of yourself? Which part of your identity is the most true, and which part do you want the world to see? Which part of you do you want the world to remember most clearly?

I was looking for answers, remember? Not just my own, but answers for the four guys who felt as real to me than any band I'd seen on tour. There is so much poetry and beauty surrounding these men, their nightmare of a tour, and the dissent that vibrates between them. It's a movie about holding yourself and your friends together even though the world is doing everything it can to take you apart.

Cut the rockstar bullshit.

Calling it a mockumentary, or a "hilarious rockumentary," as the box art does, is dismissive and insulting. It's shot in a documentary style, yes, the kind of thing that would be called "found footage" if it was released today. It's "mock" in that it's fictional, and also "mock" in that it satirical, but categorizing it is difficult. Maybe that's why in so much of the press material and write ups, including the DVD cover itself, Hard Core Logo is compared to This Is Spinal Tap. That comparison has deeply concerned me since the first time I saw it, not only because of my fanatical need for truth in movie descriptions, but because of my appreciation for the more serious aspects of the movie. It's about going broke, getting old, losing your friends, losing your way, losing your mind, and trying to figure out what your eventual legacy will be.

Both Spinal Tap and Hard Core Logo are about musicians, but that's about where the comparisons end. Tonally, they take space up at opposite ends of the spectrum - Spinal Tap keeping very cozy near the silly line, Hard Core Logo lodging itself much closer to serious and dramatic, inching over to silly only when no one is paying attention. It has moments of humor, but it's not jokey. It squeezes into the darkest corners of humor, the kind that only develops after you've known your friends for too many years and you've seen them at their worst. When those friends have seen you at your worst, your lowest, your most desperate.

"It's funny though. ...to me.," Joe justifies. "It's funny."

The downfall of so many movies about bands is that, uh, the music sucks. Hard Core Logo avoids the trap. The music is hard, and the lyrics are simple and strong, but it's the concert performances that put the perfect frame around the whole sloppy picture. Hugh Dillion, who plays Joe Dick, isn't a stranger to the stage, having lead the rock band The Headstones on and off since 1987. (Dillon's story is a true rock and roll saga, and I encourage you to look him up, but only after you watch the movie.) He spits and snarls and steamrolls through the movie, not selling the role but being it. Never does it feel like you're watching a bunch of actors who went to rock and roll camp for a week. I mention Dillon because Joe is the pack leader, but the other actors that make up the band: Callum Keith Rennie as Billy Tallent, guitarist; John Pyper-Ferguson as Oxenberger, bassist; and Bernie Coulson, as drummer Pipefitter; are as important as any rhythm section. You'll recognize any of these guys if you've watched television in the last couple decades - Supernatural, Battlestar Galactica, The X-Files, Criminal Minds, Bones, Smallville, the CSIs, Lost, The L Word, Californication. In HCL, these character actors are leading men, and there's not a single inauthentic note in any of their performances.

Watching this movie now is like busting into a time capsule, dug out of a filthy rock club bathroom floor. Hard Core Logo is a film that exists purely in the time where it was made. There would be no plausible way for large chunks of the plot to work now, in the internet age. The short years of dead space between the release of Hard Core Logo and the popularization of social media and the lightening-fast way we each move information now, provide a bumper of distance that allows the movie to happen the way it does. As the band makes their way across Canada, there's no Twitter to check fan reactions to shows. There's no Instagram for backstage party pictures or Soundcloud to hear new music.

There's no contact.

This aspect of Hard Core Logo truly makes the movie special for me. As a teenager, I went to a lot of concerts. I wore a lot of lanyards and passed through a lot of curtains. I was lucky and determined and maybe young or cute enough, which helped me spend time with a ton of musicians I wouldn't have been able to otherwise. It was fun and games for me, because there was mystery to the people behind the music. Getting those little glimpses of the rider or pre-show rituals was unique, because I knew it wasn't being shared with three million Twitter followers. That game doesn't really exist anymore, with social media managers and artists selling VIP passes as part of the concert experience.  

Or maybe it does still exist, and I've just been out of the backstage game too long?

I'm not looking to get back in, though. I can watch Hard Core Logo again and get that little contact high whenever I'm feeling overly nostalgic.

I suffer for his art.

That old detachment between the famous and the fan forced a blind faith in our idols, created from our hopes that they want what's best for us - in their privacy, in their distance - something that seems as alien today as the sound of dial-up.