The 25th anniversary New York Asian Film Festival takes place from July 10th to July 26th. For details and showtimes, click here.
One thing that doesn’t generally make it to the front of my bio is my appreciation for punk music. I’m nowhere near an expert, and my youth was the heydey of the pop-punk movement, which did an incredible job of convincing me that the genre as a whole was… well, ‘not for me’ would be the way the evolved, present day version of me would put it.
‘Hot garbage’ would be my younger selves’ unvarnished phrasing.
But of course that was merely the corporate tip of a music style far more vast and more interesting the further one gets from the mainstream and, indeed, the modern day. And among the most important things director Tomorowo Taguchi and screenwriter Kankuro Kudo get right in their tribute to the origins of Japanese punk music Street Kingdom, it’s that nothing good comes of chasing mainstream success. This is not the story of a group of bands that played stadiums and rules the charts; the biggest achievement of the biggest band on display here is that they do a small international tour and wind up playing a club in Great Brtiain. And spoilers, I suppose, but by the end of the film, most of the people involved have gotten out of the game and taken up blue collar jobs.
But importantly, the film doesn’t see any of this as a failure. It is notable that when they look back on their success, it’s not so much about their accomplishments as it is about the fact they did any of it at all. This is a movie that genuinely believes thatthe truest expression of the punk ethos is in what you can build with your own two hands and your own love. And in so doing becomes perhaps the last thing you’d expect: a wholly and unabashedly earnest punk film.
Granted, this is something i myself didn’t expect. Certainly not coming from this particular screenwriter: Kankuro Kudo wrote two of the most purely entertaining flicks (and I do mean flicks) I’ve seen in my whole decade long history of covering NYAFF, The Mole Song: Hong Kong Capriccio and Too Young To Die! Both films were raucous, over-the-top comedies that wore their hip, postmodern irreverence like a deranged badge of honor. And so somehow I expected much the same here. Something flipant, that thumbs its nose at propriety in the grand punk tradition.
And to be fair, it does seem to be going in that direction at the very beginning, where a gig at a student fun fair devolves into absolute anarchy at the hands of Michio (Taiga Nakano), who strips naked, tosses pig guts at the crowd and ends the show by pissing on an absolutely terrified bystander.
But the movie doesn’t exactly stay in this mode for very long (in fact, this is actually a bit of a flash forward, and when we return to this part of the story the resolution defuses the situation in a gleefully casual manner.
This moment, as well as many others, is witnessed by one Yuichi Jibiki, asaying the protagonist role. His autobiography being the source of this adaptation. As played by Kazunobu MIneta, Jibiki is a small town photographer who happens to hear the Sex Pistols on the radio, an incident that changes him on almost a chemical level. A letter to a punk music fanzine sets off a chain of events that leads to the creation of an “authentically Japanese punk scene” known as the Tokyo Rockers. And Jibiki, with his penchant for directly addressing the camera, is our guide through it all.
A note about that, actually:
That scene I mentioned earlier, where Michio goes buck wild on the crowd?
There is a moment where Michio and Jibiki bond over being the same age, 31.
Taiga Nakano, the actor who plays Michio was born in 1993.
Kazunobu Mineta, who plays Yuichi, was born in 1977, and looks every inch his years.
And yet, there is something in Mineta’s performance that almost made me disbelieve my eyes; he plays Yuichi with a wide-eyed passion that borders on the childlike. The overall effect is… bizarre. But never less than fascinating, and fits the themes and vibes of the movie perfectly.
To that end, despite the scuzzy, vulgar nature of that opening scene, the true heart of the movie liein a different, more fleeting scene– so much so that it gets repeated at the end as the core memory of that period. It is a moment where Yuichi and Sachi, the young girl who printed the zine that drew Yuichi to Tokyo in the first place, race through the streets carrying a freshly pressed stack of records to deliver to the record store. They’re practically euphoric at having become a moving part in the world they both love so much, and it’s a sense of joy that carries throughout the entire picture.
Street Kingdom is a fascinating movie to me. It carries itself with an earnestness that, in leser hands, could easily be considered corny. And it has to be said that it’s not fully immune to the gravity of the musical biopic; a subplot involving the rise and fall of Momo (Ryuya Wakaba), one of the key players on the scene, follows the expected arc to a T, though it resolves itself in a much softer, fuzzier way. But even there, the film treats it almost as an abstraction, as if it’s committed to showing the warts but not at the risk of fully kiling the vibe. It’s inherent kindness, warmth and sincere sense of ecstatic joy mark it out as unique to the genre, and probably worth a spin for those who might be interested.
Cool music, too.
Probably should have mentioned that earlier.
