Music Mondays Presents Half-Cocked

Tonight, Alamo Music Mondays presents Suki Hawley’s 1994 indie-punk road movie, Half-Cocked, featuring music from bands like Unwound, Polvo, Rodan, Freakwater and The Grifters.

Half-Cocked follows five Louisville twenty-somethings as they tour across the country in a stolen van attempting to pass themselves off as an “art rock” band. As the group (played mostly by real-life members of the band Rodan) spends more and more time on the road, they begin to realize that pretending to be a band might be just as hard as actually being one—and that their ill conceived road trip (a possibly unintentional metaphor for their directionless youth) can’t last forever.

We’ll admit that we were predisposed to loving this movie—in a lot of ways, Half-Cocked mirrors our own disillusioned, teenaged flophouse years and takes place at roughly the same point in time. We were into bands like Unwound (who appear on the soundtrack) and Nation of Ulysses (whose love-him-or-hate-him frontman Ian Svenonius appears in the film). But besides our personal affection for the music, Half-Cocked is widely regarded as one of the few accurate portraits of the early 90s indie scene, and in its own unwilling way, it’s also a sentimental exploration of the confusing, frustrating years between youth and adulthood.

Music Mondays Presents Half Cocked
Monday, February 12th
Alamo Drafthouse Downtown
9:45pm, $2 / $1 Student, AFS
[Tickets]