Revenge of the Mekons

What Angio captures, beautifully, is that the Mekons make great music because, together and apart, they’re so alive to the world around them.

The film is both a generous primer on the band, which grew out of the punk movement in Leeds, England, in 1977, and a celebration of its longevity.

Angio reveals a band that is still committed and, almost without precedent, still seems to get along. “We weren’t musicians,” singer-guitarist Jon Langford admits. “We were just seeing how far we could take it.” If revenge can be measured in years of continued creativity, this film shows the Mekons have had theirs.

A contagious enthusiasm runs through the heart of Jon Angio’s Revenge of the Mekons, a documentary that celebrates and explores the evolving ethos of the seminal British punk band The Mekons while also proving that some of rock’s most interesting stories come not from success but survival.

In a way, this marvelous movie does show that the Mekons have declined, because they’ve become the one thing punk rockers never ever want to be: lovable.

Revenge Of The Mekons has none of the raggedness of the band’s best songs, and the movie only occasionally gets to that very Mekons place that novelist Jonathan Franzen describes in the film, where despair and rage over the world’s pervasive injustice resolves into something blackly humorous, and even triumphant. But Angio hasn’t made a glancing, broadly outlined fan-doc, either.

Director Joe Angio presents the group's music with the contagious enthusiasm of a diehard, but exuberance is no substitute for storytelling, and Revenge of the Mekons is in desperate need of a narrative path.