If you're at all familiar with the Washington DC hardcore scene, you can skip the first half hour of Salad Days. The documentary's opening act treads a well-worn path — Henry Rollins and Ian MacKaye are great talking heads, but the influence of Bad Brains and the formation of DC punk luminaries like Teen Idles, Minor Threat and State Of Alert is better presented elsewhere in countless film and print productions.
Salad Days gets interesting when it reminds its audience that this movement was not a united front. For every loyalist of the scene's most prominent label, Dischord Records, there was someone decrying its insularity and nepotism. For every straight-edge kid drawing Xs on their hands, there was another with a beer in hand deriding the movement's rigidity and self-seriousness.
The ruminations on DC's social context make for the most interesting viewing; as the murder capital of the nation in 1980, Washington's white flight and political focus created an untapped inner-city space ripe for a culture of disenchanted suburban youth.
Salad Days is not a revelation, but it's an effective historical document. For the initiated, the film's more obscure talking heads fill in the blanks of and illuminate the bit players in the scene's mythology. For newcomers, it's a solid introduction to the birth of the do-it-yourself culture that still exists to this day.
