»When I did Suburbia, none of those kids were actors. I felt like it was much easier to turn punk rock kids into actors than it was to turn actors into punk rockers. I always felt it didn’t feel right when actors did it, it felt phony. I think I was right in using those kids in my movies, they were reality and people sort of gravitate towards reality. Casting is the most important part of a movie – besides the script.«
– Penelope Spheeris

It’s Los Angeles in the 1980s and Evan and his kid brother Ethan hang out with a group of punks. Like the brothers, they have fled their miserable home circumstances. They have brushed with the law; they call themselves »The Rejected«. Together, they inhabit a derelict barricaded building where they form a tight ersatz family somehow making do with tapped electricity and stolen food. But when the punks start to encroach on the suburbia of the middle classes, this comes up against hefty resistance from a community organisation that goes under the name of »Citizens against Criminality«.

Three years after making her ground-breaking documentary film about the punk scene in Los Angeles The Decline of Western Civilisation (1980), Penelope Spheeris used Suburbia to take the topic further. It’s a hard-hitting snapshot, as it were, where sympathies clearly lie with the punks. The young people are played mostly by street kids and musicans including »Flea«, the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ bass player. Plus, the nascent punk scene found in producer Roger Corman the perfect kindred spirit: his cheap and dirty production and DIY aesthetics suit the punk movement down to the ground.

Film programme Exploitation