Green Room

Green Room (from Weird and Wonderful II: Fifty More Cult Films by George Hughes, available from www.freefall-productions.com)

2016 / US / 95 minutes

“If you back out now, I’ll tell them you’re Jewish!”

Director: Jeremy Saulnier / Screenplay: Jeremy Saulnier / Director of Photography: Sean Porter / Music: Brooke Blair and Will Blair / Production: Neil Kopp, Victor Moyers and Anish Savjani for Broad Green Pictures / Cast: Anton Yelchin (Pat), Imogen Poots (Amber), Alia Shawkat (Sam), Patrick Stewart (Darcy Banker), Callum Turner (Tiger), Joe Cole (Reece), Macon Blair (Gabe), Eric Edelstein (Justin), Mark Webber (Daniel), Brent Werzner (Werm), David W. Thompson (Tad), Taylor Tunes (Emily).

Hard- working ground level Punk band The Ain’t Rights are struggling through a tour of the Pacific Northwest in their van. Lead vocalist Tiger (Callum Turner), guitarist Sam (Alia Shawkat), bassist Pat (Anton Yelchin) and drummer Reece (Joe Cole) have just had a show cancelled and agree to play a replacement gig organised by promoter Tad (David W. Thompson) in a rural area outside Portland.

   Arriving at the venue, the band realise it’s a skinhead bar run by a white supremacist gang but decide to play the show anyway, even winning over some of the thuggish crowd by having the balls to play a cover of the Dead Kennedys’ Nazi Punks, Fuck Off! as their opening song.

   After the set the band are about to leave when Pat returns to the green room for Sam’s phone and stumbles across a murder scene. One of the skinheads, Werm (Brent Werzner) has stabbed a girl, Emily (Taylor Tunes), to death. Pat immediately flees and calls the police but he and the rest of the band are caught by the gang and locked in the green room with Amber (Imogen Poots), a friend of Emily’s who witnessed her murder.

   The gang stage a less serious stabbing outside to get rid of the police than call in their boss, Darcy Banker (Patrick Stewart), who owns the bar and the surrounding land (as well as the secret drug lab beneath it). Darcy begins devising a plan to destroy all evidence of the crime and dispose of all witnesses, leaving the Ain’t Rights with no option but to try and fight their way out of the green room.

   Based on writer / director Jeremy Saulnier’s own experiences playing in Punk bands in the ’90’s (the Ain‘t Rights’ “Original” songs are actually lesser known covers too, all of them being songs written by Saulnier and his friends during that era), Green Room is a brilliantly intense and incredibly desperate and brutal fight for survival. Beginning out on the open road with the band in their tour van, things soon get extremely claustrophobic once we enter the club and the band begin their struggle to try and get out again.

   Although much was made of Patrick Stewart’s scene- stealing turn in a rare villainous role at the time of release, the young actors playing the band are exceptionally good too, with the late Anton Yelchin’s Pat (the bass player, no less) eventually emerging as the closest thing Green Room has to a lead character. Yelchin, of course, already had an indirect connection to Stewart due to their previous roles in different Star Trek productions (and, at the time, Yelchin had seemed much more likely to return to that franchise than Stewart- who had seemingly left it behind before Jean- Luc Picard’s recent comeback).

   As well as Chekov in three Trek films, Yelchin had also played another established Sci- Fi favourite, Kyle Reese, in Terminator: Salvation (2009) where he came much closer to capturing the character first played by Michael Biehn in James Cameron’s 1984 original than any of the other actors who have attempted the role. Yelchin would tragically die in a car accident in the summer of 2016 just after the release of Green Room with his last performance as Chekov in Star Trek: Beyond released posthumously later the same year.

   Alia Shawkat forced a rewrite of the part of Sam when she auditioned for it (the band had originally been written as all male) and is another standout. She’d previously covered similar ground in Floria Sigismondi’s The Runaways (2010) where she played the fictional bassist “Robin” (neither of The Runaways’ real bass players had wanted to be depicted, necessitating the creation of a composite character).

   The other two Ain’t Rights are portrayed by British actors Joe Cole (Peaky Blinders, Gangs of London) and Callum Turner (John Boorman’s Queen and Country) who both had to learn accents as well how to perform live. Imogen Poots provides much of the gallows humour as Amber, one of the gang’s few sympathetic members who has ended up with them pretty much by accident (it also eventually emerges that Emily was murdered because she was trying to leave the skinhead life). There are also a few laughs to be had with the ongoing “Desert Island Band” conversation, as well as Pat “Fixing” himself by binding his wounds with the roadies’ answer to everything- electrical tape.

   Whilst the band’s shunning of social media or any other online presence is presented as ideological Punk purity, it would seem pretty unlikely by the time of the film’s production (Saulnier had had the story idea for years before filming it). Similarly, the way all the characters’ mobile phones are swiftly taken out of the equation very early on suggests the updating of a much older script.

   Another anachronism is Tad’s description of the skinhead gang as “Far right, but technically ultra- left”. At the time Saulnier was on the road himself, some American nationalist white supremacist elements did claim to be economically left wing and would describe themselves as socialists (in much the same way the term was abused by the Nazis) in order to gain more working class recruits. Nowadays, however, racist groups in the US consider anything left of centre “Communist” and, just as it was with the Nazis, genuine socialists are among their primary targets.

   Although another skinhead in Green Room eventually has second thoughts about the suffocating ideology and lifestyle (“In the end, hate is baggage” as Edward Furlong’s newly reformed gang member put it in 1998’s American History X), the gang’s politics are not among the film’s primary concerns. Instead, the skinheads are used in much the same way as the “Street Thunder” gang members in John Carpenter’s Assault on Precinct 13 (1976) as a constant, often unseen threat to add to the claustrophobic atmosphere.