Geoff Pevere: The Hard Core Logos

The beauty of Bruce McDonald’s Hard Core Logo lay in its acknowledgement of things already gone. A fiction feature about a documentary being made about a near-legendary punk band embarking on a doomed crusade to re-boot the old glory, the movie played sadly and sharply into the myth of rock music as an eternally rejuvenating force. It ain’t. Sometimes it just makes you feel older and reminds you there’s no going back.

That the movie was also so perfectly executed, navigating the fine lines between tragedy and farce, lament and satire, celebration and exposé so precisely only made it that much more pungent. It was a movie in love with rock & roll mythology yet fully aware of its bullshit, and the grim allure in watching it was knowing everything was doomed. Plus it featured Hugh Dillon (as the self-immolating lead singer Joe Dick) and Callum Keith Rennie (as the rising rock star guitarist Billy Talent) in probably the most precisely-rendered rock bro-mance ever. Their intricate dance of poisonous co-dependency was the movie’s bleeding heart and toxic soul.

Joe Dick – who shot himself in front of McDonald’s camera at the end of the movie — exists only in spirit in McDonald’s bravely-titled Hard Core Logo II, and Billy Talent is nowhere but in a few flashbacks. None of the other members of the band are there either, and all of this merely ratchets up the potential redundancy factor: I mean, if your main characters aren’t there, if one of them’s dead, and if the first movie was all about the pointlessness of going back in the first place, what in god’s name could possess one to go back and do it again?

Easy. You can’t help it. You’re haunted. This is the motivating premise behind Hard Core II, that no amount of reason or first hand experience can dilute the myth’s power. That’s why rock music is so very much more than just music: it comes with a philosophy, an attitude and a worldview attached, and this adds up to a kind of spiritual calling heard even from beyond the grave. Not just Joe Dick’s grave, but the grave of rock itself. The point in rock as a lifestyle wasn’t that it really offered a revolutionary alternative to real life, but that it felt like it could. If you ever bought into it, or if you ever believed the bullshit for even just a instant, you can never really let it go.

And that’s exactly what Hard Core Logo II is about. It begins with Bruce McDonald’s narration as he tells us just how his career has panned out since the events captured in the first movie. Although persistently demonized for nudging Joe Dick into his final display of punk purity, McDonald’s fictional alter-ego (played, again, by Bruce McDonald) has gone on to become a successful Los Angeles director of a wildly successful Kung Fu meets Billy Graham show called The Pilgrim, and these fruits have sustained him nicely until the recent revelations that his star was caught engaging in international sex tourism with underage boys. This is why McDonald decides to pack up and head off with his witchy neighbour in search of Care Failure, the lead singer of a band called Die Mannequin who may or may not be possessed by the spirit of Joe Dick.

If the subject of the first film was the dangerously addictive nature of rock mythology, and especially the way it warped the trajectory of the lives of those who really believed it, the second is about living with the mythology as one of its agents. No matter how successful Bruce McDonald has become, no matter how deeply he buries himself in the Hollywood Hills behind a wall of family-values bankability, he knows that he will forever be the guy who made Hard Core Logo and filmed Joe Dick’s suicide, and that that’s all he’ll ever be. As much as he may rationalize otherwise – and Hard Core Logo II, written by McDonald and Richard Griffiths, resounds with the sound of the fictional McDonald trying to convince himself there’s more to his life than Joe’s death – McDonald knows he’s doomed himself to live forever in the myth he so instrumentally helped create.

I really admired and enjoyed Hard Core Logo II, despite the fact it’s by definition and even bleaker and more doomstruck movie than its predecessor. It’s very smart and funny, and McDonald and Griffith’s treatment of the ongoing punishing moral conundrum suffered by the filmmaker is both unforgiving and a worthy subject of dramatic inquiry in its own right. McDonald plays McDonald as a lost and bumbling soul, and watching him trudge through the snows of Saskatchewan (where Die Mannequin has gone to record) while dressed in cammo-overalls, parka, headphones and cowboy hat says just about everything one can about the sheer effort of moving on. In a way, it seems reasonable to interpret the entire thing as McDonald attempting to understand the legacy of the movie he’s probably best known for, but I think more fundamentally it’s about the same thing that Hard Core Logo was: the imperviously powerful nature of the romance of rock & roll, the thing that makes you fall in love forever with something that can’t last.

Naturally, Hard Core Logo II has already come and gone from those few Canadian theatres where it had a brief theatrical run. Keep an eye out for it in repertory if your neighbourhood is so blessed, otherwise check it out when it becomes available on DVD. And please don’t regard it as a sequel. McDonald himself has called it a ‘B-side’ to the original, but I’d describe it as a coda. Or a very, very long fade out to studio silence.

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Geoff Pevere’s column appears every Friday.

Contact us at dbawis@rogers.com

Geoff Pevere has been writing, broadcasting and teaching about movies, media and popular culture for over thirty years. He can’t help himself. His column appears every Friday.