SLC Poser: Growing Up, Selling Out, and Rewatching 'SLC Punk!'

By Hannah Ferguson

It went like this: an XL blazer from the men’s section at Goodwill. A single menthol American Spirit passed around, the filter wet with spit. A shiny new pair of Doc Martens your mom bought you at the mall. The Descendents’ Suburban Home blasting through the speakers.

Politically, we were pissed. Spiritually, we were convinced we were one of a kind—at least to ourselves. And in a world where so little media mirrored our lives back at us, James Merendino’s 1998 film SLC Punk! shone like a neon beacon for jaded middle-class kids in the alternative scene.

The suburbia of the American West. The house shows. The mosh pits. The monotony of day-to-day living. The angst. The soundtrack. Matthew Lillard in all his blue-haired glory—like a little punk Jesus with his little punk commandments, preaching a gospel of adolescent rage.

I first saw the film at seventeen, seven years ago now, and it’s stayed with me ever since. Upon recent rewatch, I realized I was right to have loved this film—it may be one of the most raw and poignant coming-of-age stories ever told. But I fear I loved it for all the wrong reasons.

Does that make me a poser? Yeah, probably.

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Because while SLC Punk! is often remembered for its humor and campy bravado—or dismissed as a cult classic for the weird kids (only 62% on Rotten Tomatoes? Seriously? Go f*ck yourself)—what makes it endure is something deeper: its unflinching introspection about growing up, selling out, and deciding what rebellion truly means.

Salt Lake City, Utah. 1985. Punks and recent college graduates Stevo and Heroin Bob are trying to figure out how to live out their rebellion in one of the most conservative cities in America. Between basement shows, drunken brawls, and long-winded rants about anarchy, they wrestle with what it actually means to be “punk.” Stevo refuses to follow in his father’s footsteps, insisting that Harvard Law School isn’t for him, while Heroin Bob never had any plans or familial support to lean on. As we follow their lives post-graduation, we witness shifts in both their relationship with each other and their sense of belonging.

As we enter into the Salt Lake hardcore scene through Stevo’s memoir-style narrative, often punctuated by humorous or ironic asides,  it becomes apparent to us that this anarchistic punk mentality is merely another box and system that Stevo is forcing himself to conform to. He denies his own privilege and potential by retreating into superiority, feeling above those who make ‘conventional’ choices. As the people around him begin to break out of their own constraints—Mike heading off to Notre Dame, Bob entering into a committed relationship—Stevo projects his own fear of unbelonging onto them, labeling everyone as “posers.”

The irony of our self-proclaimed anarchist is that Stevo is clinging to order— to what is rational and known. He fears what will happen when his friends move away. He watches with confusion as those around him find purpose in their work, their relationships, their community, and those who don’t make it out at all. He doesn’t see himself fitting into any of these boxes. His own life is descending into the anarchistic disorder he claims to embrace.

This movie perfectly captures the landslide that is the end of adolescence. Slowly, the ground begins to shift beneath your feet; your footing becomes uncertain, and then, without warning, it crashes down on you. The film’s atmosphere sits in the space between an inhale and an exhale. You don’t move through the scenes— you sit in them. Waiting for something to happen, which it may or may not.  We follow Stevo as he drifts through parties, fights, and endless conversations, suspended in that liminal space where youth begins to fracture into adulthood. His narration pulls us in like a confidant, reminding us that these memories are not just events but fragments of a worldview he’s still trying to make sense of.

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It’s in this drifting, in-between space that the film’s most defining conversations emerge. What is often credited as the most important scene in the film is when Stevo first meets Brandy, his now-girlfriend. She takes in his plaid pants and dyed hair, saying, "Wouldn't it be more of an act of rebellion if you didn't spend so much time buying blue hair dye and going out to get punky clothes?... You look like you're wearing a uniform. You look like a punk. That's not rebellion...that's fashion. Rebellion happens in the mind. You can't create it...you just are that way." 

While Brandy’s observation redefines Stevo’s understanding of punk, the film hints at an even deeper truth earlier on. For me, the most integral scene actually comes about ten minutes earlier…, when Stevo is in the basement of a house party arguing with Chris about structure versus chaos. Stevo keeps loudly insisting that the natural world inevitably collapses into disorder—that chaos is unavoidable. Chris pushes back: Yes, but then what? You’re born, you die, and then your atoms reform into something else—maybe a blade of grass. That simple idea seems to be exactly what Stevo needed to hear: that there is a greater logic at play, even if he can’t yet grasp it. That while his life is descending into disorder and confusion, his atoms—his very being—will eventually reform into something new, something he can’t yet imagine.

It’s a moment that crystallizes the film’s central tension: order dissolving into chaos, only to return again as a different kind of order. That conversation mirrors both the plot and the theme of SLC Punk!, suggesting that collapse is not an end but a transformation. The atoms may reconvene in unexpected ways, but that doesn’t make the process any less intentional. And when I think about myself and my friends, where we began and all the ways our little punk atoms chose to reform, I see that same pattern—we too have grown into the world through our own rebellions. The people I have been privileged to call my friends are proof of that: educators, environmentalists, artists, volunteers, organizers, advocates—people who took their chaos and built better worlds in their own ways. From order to chaos to order again, just as it was said. Chaos is not the destination; it is the touchstone in the cycle. We return to it again and again, each time emerging as something new. And that’s gotta be the most punk thing of all, right?