The seeds of the story were planted in producer Cristan Reilly’s school days. “I knew Jim [Lindberg of Pennywise] in high school,” she says. “We were friends. I’m not allowed to say how we met, but we were partying; the things we bonded over, the things we talked about are things he’s forbidden me to talk about. Anyway, I kept in touch with him over the years and I heard he wrote a book called Punk Rock Dad. And with his sense of humor and sensibility, I thought it would be worthy of not only a look, but a deeper exploration. I read the book, and loved it. And [director] Andrea [Blaugrund] and I have been friends for about 20 years. We met when we were 10, and this film was only going to happen for me if Andrea was interested. So I took her the book. She had been raising children; we both had. And within 48 hours, by Sunday night, she was like ‘Let’s do it!’”
Blaugrund, though, was not actively making films at that point, having moved on to another profession: “I’d taken this time off to be a mom, or quote-unquote ‘time off’ I should say. There’s no harder job I’ve ever had than being a mom to three little kids! But I took this time away from being a filmmaker, and I read it, and I thought, there’s no better prism to look at something that you’ve been through than to look at it from the most experienced point of view. So, I had been struggling and reevaluating myself as a mom, and here was somebody that was evaluating their point of view as an anti-authoritarian. I had just been fairly mainstream lefty, but here was Jimmy having to take a much bigger leap. So what a fun way to discuss what I’d been through than by looking at what he went through and how he was reconciling being himself to being a father.”
Blaugrund and Reilly soon found the story was going to be much deeper than they had realized. “What was exciting for us about the project,” Blaugrund remembers, “was that it led us down a much deeper path, and we began to explore how these guys came to punk, which was all through rebellion against the man. And the man ultimately, for a lot of these guys, was their father, because their father hadn’t been there. Societally they hadn’t been there, they weren’t required to be there, and they were angry at the whole thing. And that was a really amazing thing to understand, but when they are handed a child, that all comes full circle and they begin to see their own anger and reevaluate it. And that reevaluation was a redemption, and to allow them to talk about that was a gift.”
Ironically enough, punk music generally arises from pain and frustration, the same frustration that the punk rock dads are doing their best to save their own children from. So does that mean the music will mean less to those kids? “I do think that a well-raised child still has to rebel against his parents somewhat,” says Blaugrund, “in order to break the bond and become free and a successful member of society. There will always be that need, but I don’t think that it will be as long-lived as these guys, where they continue on through their thirties, into their forties. Many of them postponed child-bearing until then, and suddenly it was like, ‘Holy shit.’”
And sometimes that rebellion is expressed in unusual ways, says Reilly: “The adolescent daughter, Mia, when they asked her what kind of music she listened to, it was classical. She played the violin. Beautiful violin player. One of the amazing things is that many of the guys had daughters. So it’s a very different kind of rebellion to deal with. It didn’t make the movie, but like Jim said, ‘What did God give a bunch of punk rockers? Daughters.’”
Of course, making a movie about a bunch of punk rockers isn’t always the easiest job in the world. Lindberg had to be convinced to get involved, which slowly brought access to other punk dads. “There were a couple days where I wanted to pull my hair out,” laughs Reilly. “And we felt a lot of responsibility to be sensitive to their protective natures and to their story, but to ultimately figure out how Andrea would uncover everything she uncovered with them. But with Jimmy, there were definitely days I wanted to strangle him, and I just had to say ‘Oh, yeah, that’s why. He’s a punk.’ You really saw that punk nature come out on many occasions where we would butt heads. ‘I will not do what you say.’ He would fight me and we would get into these philosophical arguments, and he felt very strongly and passionately about not filming his daughters at some points. It just makes it very hard to tell a story.”
Blaugrund, who was relatively new to punk, had a special challenge trying to make a punk film from outside the culture itself. She listened to every subject’s records and watched every punk movie she could find. “What I could bring to the table was a fresh sensibility,” she says. “I was coming in more as an anthropologist than as an existing punk fan. It’s a very, very specific and inside thing. I wanted to make something that was much more accessible, to explore how I came to understand it. In addition, in order to keep that cred, we hired a punk fan as our editor, and he really helped us create that look and that snappy edge.”
But through the film, she began to see punk in a more three-dimensional way: “Yeah, these were a group of guys I was scared of. I grew up in New York City, and CBGB’s was alive and well at the time, and I would cross the street to avoid these guys because they look creepy. And that’s how they’re meant to look; they’re meant to look scary. And never in a million years did I expect to sit across from a table with them and have these incredibly poetic conversations about life and living and child-rearing. That was a huge surprise. These were all poets at their root. Very sensitive, very aware of the world around them, very passionate, very tender. That’s a word I wouldn’t in a million years have applied to them, but that’s absolutely the case. And they have to create these shells with this porcupine exterior and find each other in a sort of tribal way. So I think that was the biggest surprise—that we could have conversations about the most important things to me that were also the most important things to them. Originally we were thinking it was funny, but it went much deeper than that.”
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