Harley Flanagan: Wired for Chaos review – The riotous life story of a hardcore punk god | film

H“He looks like a human bull,” says a friend. You don’t have to be a fan of early punk to enjoy this documentary about the amazing life of Harley Flanagan, founder, guitarist and singer of the New York band Cro-Mags. At the age of thirteen, Flanagan was the drummer in the band Stimulators, playing with Madness and the Cramps. He was the artful dodger of punk, with a few animals from the Muppets; They beat behind the drums, shirtless, with a mop of hair. As another speaker says: Punk didn’t shape him, it shaped him.

Flanagan was born in 1967 to a drug-addicted mother (that baby was on a dirty mattress on the floor, he says). Poet Allen Ginsberg rescued his mother from a hippie commune; They lived in New York in the previously renovated Lower East Side, which in archival footage from the late 1970s and early 1980s looks like a war zone, with burned-out buildings and rubble everywhere. In the punk scene, the kid behind the drums was a novelty; But Flanagan was subjected to drugs and sexual assault on numerous occasions.

Stories keep coming. There was a time when the Stimulators played Belfast during the Troubles and returned to the US with a shaved head. Or the New York nightclub that took a $10,000 hit for killing him (or exposing him to violence, no one’s quite sure). At some point, Flanagan became a Hare Krishna and then a jiu-jitsu coach; Later, in 2012, he was arrested and charged with stabbing two Cro-Mags members, but the charges were dropped. The filmmakers’ interviews with Flanagan may have questioned more about his anger and feelings toward his mother; This is still one hell of a story. “If it weren’t for the music, I would have surely ended up dead or in prison,” he says.