The opening of the new documentary about the loud, hilarious and irreverent ’90’s band the Lunachicks features the same kinds of devices anyone who’s ever watched a music documentary will be familiar with: a shot of an audience, with accompanying excited murmurings, and then, voices making fearless assertions: “Everything was a challenge that needed to be conquered,” “We’re gonna, like, melt people’s fu*king faces off because they expected us to suck,” “We were literally out there with people throwing pint glasses at our heads and pulling their dicks out at us,” and then: “But we have a superpower when we’re together. And it was us against everybody. It was like us against the world.”
You see the back of a leather jacket — if you’re a fan, you know it’s Theo Kogan, the band’s formidable lead singer — and you can see her shoulders square as though she’s girding herself for battle. And then there she is, bounding onstage at New York City’s Webster Hall in 2021, for a pair of reunion concerts that were scheduled and then rescheduled multiple times because of COVID-19, raising her arms in triumph.
