Half-Cocked

(Rumur)

Video Review by Adam McKibbin

It doesn’t get much more DIY than Half-Cocked, a sort of black-and-white Slacker for the mid-‘90s indie-rock crowd.  Much to the horror of those of us old enough to have endured some coming-of-age struggles of our own in the ‘90s, so much time has passed that Half-Cocked is now getting a…10-year anniversary release!  Like any good anniversary reissue, it comes stuffed with goodies:  music videos, a ton of photos, and the hour-long feature Radiation, the follow-up from filmmakers Suki Hawley and Michael Galinsky.

As for the main event, Half-Cocked is a willfully sloppy and deliberately shambling film that takes a look into the touring lifestyle of an indie band—a look that is intermittently romantic but largely jaded and bittersweet.  One of the mantras of Hollywood is “know thy audience,” and Hawley and Galinsky certainly know theirs:  anyone who has been in the music biz or spent hours flipping through record store bins.  While some aspects of the industry remain the same now as then, others have been turned in their head—particularly the manner in which bands drum up publicity and the amount of effort it takes to be a serviceable music snob.  The pre-Internet and pre-cell phone era already seems positively Flintstone when shown on film.

The story, in a nutshell, revolves around a group of kids (young adults) who are feeling trapped and misunderstood in their hometown of Louisville.  One of their older brothers plays in a moderately successful local cover band called The Guillotines; he, like the meatheads who throw beer at our protagonists and call them “fags” because of their haircuts, is an oppressive force on their lives—so much so that they wind up stealing the Guillotines van and gear.  Van theft and gear theft occur with sobering frequency on the road, but one hardly ever hears of theft by sibling.  Without giving too much away, the group of newly christened outlaws wind up stumbling into their very first live performance, where they appall the crowd (because, y’know, they don’t know how to play), but win over the evening’s headliner with their don’t-give-a-fuck ethos. 

Half-Cocked coasts on charm and even manages to feel like an important time capsule, despite leaden pacing and a contrived climax.  Like Kevin Smith and Clerks, Hawley and Galinsky enlisted non-actors to fill out the cast, resulting in a feel that falls somewhere between “oh my god, they don’t know their lines” and “this is the most dead-on depiction imaginable.”  The characters themselves often have little to say, but the filmmakers deftly document the unavoidable silliness and strain of being in a band struggling to find its way.