Kill Your Idols (2006)

If American punk blew up the edifice of mainstream rock, the New York No Wave scene of the late '70s and early '80s made the CBGB revolution sound like FM lite. Supreme noisemakers such as Sonic Youth and Arto Lindsay forged a brave new cacophony, and this documentary captures, in black-and-white video, how they emerged from the starving bohemia of Manhattan's lower depths — at least, it does for about half an hour. Kill Your Idols then takes a misguided swerve into the current downtown New York rock scene, so that it can spend more time preaching about the anarchy of the good old days than it does revealing them.