Read This: A longtime CBGB fixture absolutely and hilariously rips into the new movie
Marc Campbell, frontman of longtime CBGB favorites The Nails, says the new movie about the venue is “dreadful,” as well as “dramatically inert and ridiculously inauthentic.” In a smart and hilarious rant posted on Dangerous Minds, Campbell calls the film’s director, Randall Miller, “clueless,” saying that he’s “taken a stage dive into the arms of nothingness.”
The whole post is absolutely worth reading, but Campbell’s main gripes come from both the film’s depiction of the Ramones as a bunch of brain dead losers and from the complete lack of black musicians in the movie. As Campbell rightly points out, quite a few bands that played CBGB contained non-white members, like Bad Brains, Living Colour, The Dead Kennedys, and his own band, The Nails. Beyond that, Campbell says the movie falters when “some knife-wielding Hispanic street creeps, whose sole dramatic purpose is to bum everybody out, stab a swastika-wearing punk rocker in the only scene intended to yank a tear in the entire fucking film. Yeah, tears get shed for the Nazi youth while rock ‘n’ roll niggers get no fucking recognition at all.”
For what it’s worth, Dead Boys Guitarist Cheetah Chrome (who is portrayed by Rupert Grint in the movie) has said Campbell has an “axe to grind,” and that, when it comes to the movie, he “misses the point entirely.”