Harley Flanagan: Wired for Chaos review – riotous life story of hardcore punk godhead

He looks like a human pit bull, says a friend. You don’t have to be a fan of early hardcore punk to enjoy this documentary about the incredible life of Harley Flanagan, founder, bassist and vocalist of the New York band Cro-Mags. By the age of 13, Flanagan was the drummer in the Stimulators, playing with Madness and the Cramps. He was punk’s Artful Dodger, with a bit of Animal from the Muppets thrown in; hammering away behind the drums, bare chested, with a mop of hair. As another talking head puts it: punk didn’t shape him, he shaped punk. Flanagan was born in 1967 to a drug-addict mother (he was that baby on a dirty mattress on the floor, he says). The poet Allen Ginsberg rescued his mom from a hippy commune; they lived in New York on the pregentrified Lower East Side, which in archive footage from the late 1970s and early 80s looks like a war zone, with burnt-out buildings and rubble everywhere. On the punk scene, a kid behind the drums was a novelty; but Flanagan was exposed to drugs and sexually assaulted on numerous occasions. The stories keep coming. There was the time the Stimulators played Belfast during the Troubles and he came back to the US a skinhead. Or the New York night club that took out a $10,000 hit to have him killed (or rough him up, no one is quite sure). At some point, Flanagan became a Hare Krishna and then a jujitsu instructor; later, in 2012, he was arrested and charged with stabbing two members of Cro-Mags, but the charges were dropped. The film-makers’ interviews with Flanagan might, perhaps, have probed him more about his anger and his feelings about his mother; still, it’s one hell of a story. “Without music,” he says, “I would’ve definitely ended up dead or in jail.” • Harley Flanagan: Wired for Chaos is in UK cinemas from 14 November.