Matthew Lillard’s motor-mouthed punk rocker opens SLC Punk! with this voiceover and a black screen, and it serves as a sort of mission statement for the film that follows: Lillard’s Stevo is a hyper, anti-authoritarian, and occasionally violent smartass living in Salt Lake City, an especially conservative outpost in a country led at the time by Ronald Reagan (punk’s Public Enemy No. 1). Stevo and his friends take the hostility they encounter for their looks and lifestyle and turn it around as an indictment of the intolerant country that purports to celebrate freedom. Because rednecks are some of the biggest offenders of that intolerance, Stevo and his friend Bob begin SLC Punk! by beating “America incarnate” with pipes. Take that, oppressors!
