Film

Punk: Attitude

Name: Punk: Attitude
Genre: Documentary, Music
Released: 2005
Cast: K.K. Barrett, Roberta Bayley, Jello Biafra, Glenn Branca, John Cale

Musical

A crisp, exhilarating sprint through punk's origins and evolution, from New York's proto-punk underground through the Sex Pistols' explosion and beyond. Brisk enough to sustain momentum, smart enough to dig past the clichés, it's essential viewing for anyone curious about how a musical and cultural eruption happened—and why it mattered.

TMDb rating

3.6

Should you watch it?

Watch it if you want a talky, opinionated history of punk told by the people who made it, and you enjoy hearing scenes argue about who started what and why it mattered.

Skip it if you want a tight, polished music documentary with lots of performance footage; this leans on interviews and talking heads, and the clips can feel thin or hurried.

What it asks of you: It runs about an hour and a half and sits mostly in conversation, so it rewards patience and a willingness to follow a long chain of anecdotes rather than a steady visual drive.

Not sure? Find tonight's pick in a minute.

If you liked this

The Last Waltz1978

Martin Scorsese documents The Band's farewell concert with the same reverence and visual precision that Punk: Attitude brings to music history. Proves that rockumentaries can be cinema.

But Focuses on classic rock, not punk—a different idiom entirely. Nearly three hours, and far more sentimental than anarchic.

24 Hour Party People2002

Dramatises the Manchester scene's rise through joy division, New Order, and acid house. Raucous, funny, and captures punk's spirit of DIY defiance translated into a different era and sound.

But Fictional and knowingly chaotic in structure. If you want documentary fact, this inventive retelling will feel slippery and evasive.

Sid and Nancy1986

Alex Cox's electric portrait of punk's most self-destructive couple. Raw, stylised, and uncompromising—gets under the skin of what punk's nihilism actually cost.

But Heavily dramatised and ultimately tragic. Not a history lesson but a descent into heroin and violence; bleak rather than celebratory.

Not sure tonight? Get a pick in a minute, starting from Punk: Attitude

The wildcard

Something you would not have found on your own.

Smithereens1982

Both are documents of a time and place's raw vitality. Punk: Attitude charts the music's ideas; Smithereens shows what those ideas looked like lived in, day to day, among the broke and the restless.

Susan Seidelman's debut is a punk film in spirit if not subject: set in Manhattan, about small-time hustlers and hangers-on, made on a shoestring with genuine urgency. Captures the *texture* of punk life outside any club.

But Deliberately unglamorous and deliberately slow. Shot on actual 16mm in actual scrappy locations. Some will find it boring rather than authentic.

Control2007

Ian Curtis and Joy Division emerged from punk's ferment into something darker and more introspective. A haunting portrait of post-punk's emotional core and the cost of genius.

But Austere and slow-paced. Black and white, sparse sound design. More tomb than party.

A Band Called Death2013

An African American punk band from Detroit, lost to time, rediscovered decades later. Expands punk's geography and race politics beyond the usual London and New York conversation.

But The story is almost too perfect—redemptive arc, right-place-right-time recovery. Feels tidier than the messiness of actual punk history.

The Decline of Western Civilization1981

Penelope Spheeris' raw, unflinching portrait of LA's punk scene in its death throes. Horrifying and exhilarating in equal measure—punk as lived reality, not mythology.

But Genuinely difficult to watch in places. Unvarnished images of addiction, self-harm, and burnout. Not entertainment; documentation of a crash.

The Decline of Western Civilization poster

Liquid Sky1982

Both documents dissent through sound and image. Punk: Attitude celebrates punk's refusal to be respectable; Liquid Sky is punk's opposite number: an Eastern European outsider capturing the *same* moment of cultural rupture, independently and in alien dialect.

A Soviet sci-fi film about a junkie NYU student, aliens, and disco culture, made by Slava Tsukerman. As punk in *spirit*—visionary, hostile to comfort, DIY in execution, from outside the English-speaking mainstream—as anything called punk by name.

But Cheap-looking special effects and an avant-garde structure that resists plot. Requires patience and a tolerance for strangeness. Very much a 1982 underground film, in all senses.