Brass Knuckle Boys (Kankuro Kudo, 2008)

Brass Knuckle Boys is a Japanese film about the punk-rock music scene in Japan in the ’70s and ’80s. When an old video of young punk rock group Brass Knuckle Boys goes viral on the Internet, a young music manager is tasked with recruiting the group for the label she works for. But she discovers that it’s a 25-year-old recording and that her newest sensation (whose comeback tour has been sold out by the record label) is composed of a bunch of fifty-year-old has-beens who jump at the chance to revisit their short-lived rock-star glory days.

As a comedy, Brass Knuckle Boys is close in structure to the hilarious Japanese metal rock farce, Detroit Metal City (Toshio Lee, 2008). Driven by with the unwavering spirit of punk rock, the old rockers tour through underground venues in rural Japan, striving to remember how to play their instruments, persevering through their young audience’s heckling and rejection, through their label’s and their manager’s lack of faith, and through their personal challenges. The interesting part of the narrative is that they never get any better musically but their infectious love of punk overshadows any of their flaws, bringing them to the popular happy end in an interesting way.

With its infectious energy, Brass Knuckle Boys works because it never pretends that its characters will become musical virtuosos or evolve into different characters. Throughout the movie, the principal characters stay true to themselves, an approach that, I realize now, has almost disappeared from contemporary western pop films.

More info on IMDB

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Eric Lafalaise

Head Honcho at Red Brand Studios

Eric Lafalaise mostly communicates by writing and telling stories. He is a contributing writer to the Kinoreal film blog, a producer for Red Brand Studios, an artist, a photographer, a tech freak, and an all-around (left-right) brain nut.

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