Friday, 6 November 2015

"Green Day: Heart Like a Hand Grenade" (Guardian 06/11/15)


Green Day: Heart Like a Hand Grenade **
Dir: John Roecker. With: Billie Joe Armstrong, Tre Cool, Mike Dirnt, Mike Pelino. 120 mins. Cert: 15

This deadeningly authorised cross-promotional item suffers from that lack of curiosity common among one-night-only rock docs. Embedded with the pop-punks as they recorded their American Idiot opus, filmmaker John Roecker soon fades into the furniture: the between-take downtime’s unrevealing, while sequences on the construction of “Boulevard of Broken Dreams” and others cut far too early to polished live performances to capture the intended craft. We get a passing sense of the band’s personalities – incorrigibly boyish, even as they head into fatherhood – yet there’s nothing of substance on the music, or its notionally oppositional slant. It’s almost as though it wouldn’t hold up to sustained analysis.

Green Day: Heart Like a Hand Grenade opens in selected cinemas from today. 

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