I have to say that if wasn’t for pure chance, I would have never seen this movie. I happened to be visiting a friend in Atlanta, and, while renting a movie at the local Blockbuster, I saw this on the for sale rack. Immediately I saw “Punk” in the title and, curious, picked it up for closer examination. I am a big fan of punk music, and the whole genre is kind of fascinating to me; so I figured a movie about it could be pretty cool. The thing that pushed me over to shelling out twelve dollars was the fact that the film was an official selection of the 1999 Sundance Film Festival.

Now let's get to the meat and potatoes of the movie. The film is directed and produced by independent film maker James Merendino who hasn’t done anything that is considered major in the mainstream movie industry. It's fitting because the movies cinematic style and dialogue are a far cry from Hollywood stereotypes. Not that they are bad, they are just out of the ordinary; nonconformity is the major theme of the movie after all. An example of this would be one of the several “pause still” scenes, in which the main character Stevo interrupts the flow of the movie to converse directly with the audience.

The SLC in the title stands for Salt Lake City where a group of punks and their misadventures are set in. The main character Stevo is played by Matthew Lillard, whom you may remember from Hackers and Scream. His physical acting style dominates the film to tell the story of growing up in a religiously repressed ultra conservative city in which being different becomes a factor that alienates you from the rest of society. The audience watches the story of Stevo and Heroin Bob unfold, in a tale of endless partying, redneck bashing, and oddly the quest for love. Heroin Bob, Stevo’s roommate and fellow punker is played by Michael Goorjian, but despite the nickname he is deathly afraid of drugs, even aspirin!

The two give a grand tour of their lives and show the audience just how hard it is to embrace a total Anarchist lifestyle, much less explain their actions to themselves. While filed with violence and profanity, (about 115 "F" words, said one movie critic) the substance to back up the movie is definitely there. Stevo and Bob have graduated from high school with good grades even though they say that they are trying to bring down the oppressing system of education and government control. They soon go to community college where they will try to take down the system from the inside, but, even there, Stevo does well enough to be offered entry into Harvard law school.