An unknown punk band from the D.C. suburbs awakes to find their van in the middle of a cornfield. The driver, taking them across the country on a mildly unsuccessful tour, passed out at the wheel. Light on cash but heavy on moxie, two punks head to a skating rink to siphon gas so they can make their next gig—a lightly attended show at a restaurant that nets each member a few bucks.
But hey, it could always be worse. They could be hunted by heroin-manufacturing neo-Nazis in the backwoods of Oregon.
And, indeed, that’s the predicament that Sam (Alia Shawkat), Pat (Anton Yelchin), Reece (Joe Cole), and Tiger (Callum Turner) find themselves in about half an hour into Green Room. Desperate for a gig to afford gas on the way home, they have agreed to do a show for a crowd of skinheads at a bar owned by Darcy (Patrick Stewart).
Ever the troublemakers, the band kicks off their set with a rousing rendition of Dead Kennedys’ "Nazi Punks Fuck Off." It’s a dangerous bit of trolling that riles the crowd, but one that allows them to maintain some self-respect whilst playing for a bunch of boneheaded white supremacists.
The Ain’t Rights survive their set, but things quickly go downhill after one of the band members stumbles onto a murder.
What follows is not pretty. Green Room is unsparing in its brutality and unsentimental in its treatment of its protagonists. When the violence finally gets going, things get ugly, quickly; shattered bones and torn flesh flash across the screen. Director/writer Jeremy Saulnier isn’t sensationalistic, exactly—the camera rarely lingers on the damage to flesh done by guns, knives, and dogs—but neither does he sugarcoat the carnage. Like his previous feature, Blue Ruin, Saulnier’s Green Room is a tight and effective thriller that leaves you guessing about who will live and who will die throughout its spare 95 minute running time.
Much has been made of Stewart’s performance as the brain within the skinned heads. I can’t help but feel that this is because he’s playing a character so different from Professor X or Jean Luc Picard, rather than because he brings anything particularly compelling to the role. I don’t mean he’s bad, just that we shouldn’t be too terribly surprised that a guy routinely praised for being a great Shakespearean actor can also make a neo-Nazi scary.
More impressive, at least to your humble reviewer, is Macon Blair. He plays Gabe, the club’s manager, with a shred of sympathy—not easy to do, given that he’s a neo-Nazi trying to cover up multiple murders. There’s a need for belonging in Blair’s eyes, a desire for fellowship and acceptance that helps us understand how someone might fall prey to psychopaths such as these.
Green Room comes along at an interesting cultural moment, given the rise of the so-called "alt right"—the meme-proficient cohort of white supremacists that has flocked to Donald Trump—and the increase in rural heroin consumption. I suppose it’s not as though most of us need a reminder that racist thugs aren’t cute pseudo-intellectuals, as some websites might suggest. But it’s handy to have such a reminder nevertheless.