American hardcore punk exploded between 1980 and 1986, a short and violent stretch when bands across the country decided that punk itself had gone soft. Paul Rachman directs this account of the scene, tracing how a network of DIY bands, small labels, and all-ages clubs built a music faster and rawer than anything that came before it, spreading from coast to coast in barely six years. The film moves through that timeline city by city, treating hardcore less as a genre than as a reaction, a generation of teenagers answering both mainstream rock and the punk that had already been absorbed by it. It stays tightly bound to its own stated window, 1980 to 1986, framing hardcore as a movement that burned out almost as fast as it caught fire. The specificity of that timeframe is the film's organizing idea: this was not punk in general, but one narrow, combustible moment in it.