ABSTRACT
Punk rock movies are shambolic. Or at least they ought to be. Both Cox’s Sid and Nancy and Spheeris’s Suburbia may be feature films which have the veneer of punk-punk characters, punk living, punk music-but neither are essentially punk rock movies. Lech Kowalski’s D.O.A., on the other hand, is. Of course, there is a natural divide in that Kowalski is no filmmaker and he lacks the technical competence of Cox and Spheeris, but Kowalski brings to his film an impetuous energy-his shortcomings as a filmmaker result in a form of ‘earnest anarchism’ and the film itself the visual equivalent of the Three Chord Trick. D.O.A. doesn’t exist in order to satisfy box office returns or film critics, it exists because to make it excited Kowalski.
