Detroit Rock City Still Rocks at 25

Every kid thinks they’re the first to ever experience the heavy stuff like love and rebellion. But, and this is key, that means when stories about that kind of stuff are told well, they land for everybody—it doesn’t matter what year the bygone days are occurring, it always looks the same because it always, always sucks to be a teen. The late ’70s/early ’80s in which Detroit Rock City is set were pretty garbage times to be a teen, too. Rough time to be an underdog all around, if other things set during this time are to be believed. 

There were two coming-of-age movies about the ’70s music scene right after one another at the turn of the millennium in this and Cameron Crowe’s 2000 film Almost Famous. Almost Famous is the better movie. I’m not here to pretend otherwise: It’s shot and edited better, its feelings are deeper and sadder and more real. It is so serious.

But Detroit Rock City is the one that has a kid yell at his chain-smoking, shrieking church lady of a mother to shut the hell up about Satan and just give him his drumsticks back already. It is the only movie with Edward Furlong—in the last role of his that anybody cares about, unless you are a real fanatic of The Crow—puking every last one of his guts out on stage in a stripping contest. Our heroes in this flick are not noble or virtuous, they just want to go see a band they really like, and nobody will just get off their asses about it. They just want some degree of respect, something that is apparently too much to ask.

Detroit Rock City was about the usual 20-years-ago nostalgia people were feeling in 1999. At 25, Detroit Rock City is now a window into a time nearly half a century ago, and by virtue of that (and the fact its cast’s star power has only increased since it landed), it’s worth revisiting.

It’s 1978 in Cleveland, and four pot-smoking teens just need to get through one last day of school before they can go to a show put on by the only band they care about: Kiss. High school students Hawk (Furlong), Jam (Sam Huntington), Trip (Jason DeBello) and Lex (Giuseppe Andrews) are members of their own Kiss tribute band, Mystery, and thoroughly misunderstood by their family members. None more so than Jam, whose mother (Lin Shaye, game as she’s ever been) is the type who is happy to go around stoking moral panics and yelling at Jam for everything from his clothes to his choice in music.

The guys have scrimped and saved to score four tickets to Kiss in Detroit on the night of their last day of school. It’s just a short train ride away, provided everything goes well. Nothing does, of course: Jam’s mother discovers and cruelly destroys the tickets after embarrassing Jam in front of the entire school before committing him to a humorless Catholic boarding school, which she takes him to immediately. (I guess they’re already matriculating for next semester?) On top of it all, the rest of Mystery all get slapped with detention.

What follows is a series of mad-cap adventures as the boys bust out of school, infiltrate the boarding school to spring Jam out, make the journey to Detroit in the car Lex stole from his mother, and then do everything they can to score tickets to the show. There are a lot of plot beats, a lot of ups and downs, and a lot of stoner humor and gross-out gags along the way. It involves a dust up with a carload of disco partiers that ends in a bloody victory for our heroes and sees one of the partiers (Natasha Lyonne!) tag along with them.

Each member of the hapless troupe has his own cross to bear: Jam has to stand up to his strident mother and confess his feelings to classmate Beth (Melanie Lynskey!!). Trip has to rise above being a loser who is just “going through the motions” until he can drop out of school. Hawk has to get over his stage fright if he’s ever going to be a frontman. I guess Lex needs to rescue Natasha Lyonne from a chop shop…?

Every friend group has a night, a party, a trip—an excursion that absolutely turned to shit but was seemingly saved at the last second. Detroit Rock City is about that kind of night, and isn’t afraid to spend what had to be an absurd amount of licensing fees on securing the needledrops to evoke the time in which it’s set.

Neither the movie’s all-over-the-place plot nor its group dynamic carries it (the characters spend the entire third act apart from each other). It’s the individual moments from character actors that land hard: Furlong and Lyonne, in particular, are having fun. At one point Hawk, having poisoned Jam’s jailer at the boarding school with magic mushrooms, leeringly asks him if he’s cool with them taking Jam to a Satanic concert. Lyonne is in very real peril at one point and still fast-talking for all she’s worth. Furlong may have lost his stripping contest, but he’s caught the eye of a very forward older lady (Shannon Tweed!!!).

There is also, it has to be said in light of that clip above, a deliriously mean streak in the movie when it comes to the moral guardians of the era, whom the film paints as a bunch of hypocrites. That’s ultimately what separates it from other plays for nostalgia, and endears it to me even if it’s a little scattershot. I had the time of my life watching this when it came out, and when revisiting it. There are great movies—like Almost Famous—that are elegies for their eras and will stand the test of artistic time. Then there are movies like Detroit Rock City: Ones that don’t sugarcoat it and don’t paint youthful rebellion as anything beautiful—just fun, and timeless, and true.

Kenneth Lowe is lit! You can follow him on Twitter @IllusiveKen until it collapses, on Bluesky @illusiveken.bsky.social, and read more at his blog.