People may say I can't sing but no-one can ever say that I didn't.

The Punk Singer
Sini Anderson 2013 USA
Documentary

Kathleen Hanna is a singer, musician, activist and writer best known for engineering the riot grrrl movement and fronting the feminist punk band Bikini Kill from 1990 to 1997. After BK's breakup she created a brilliant DIY lo-fi solo album under the name Julie Ruin and formed the electro-tinged Le Tigre, expanding her range to comment on intolerance in general. They split several years later due to Hanna's undisclosed (even to her friends) and undiagnosed battle with Lyme disease. In 2006 she married her long term partner Adam Horovitz of the Beastie Boys and recently she returned to music, extending her Julie Ruin project into a group suitably named The Julie Ruin. I'm taking up this small amount of space to tell you this mainly so you don't have to sit through Sini Anderson's largely empty limp of a documentary but also because the film itself doesn't impart much more information. In Anderson's defence her style is immensely stylish and well crafted, manufacturing the look and feel of the fanzines Hanna became synonymous for making in her early career, and Hanna herself is savagely honest if unexpectedly reserved when questioned. These aren't the film's main problems though, they lay in Anderson's ineptitude in almost all other areas and the uselessness of many of the talking heads, very few of whom have anything worthwhile to offer other than unflinching hero-worship and using the word 'like' every ten seconds. They inform us of Hanna's intelligence and integrity, her talent and creativity, her fearlessness and essential role in bringing feminism to the fore of the American media. Some of these are entirely valid points but after close to an hour of having them inarticulately shown to us any power they may have once held has been completely drowned out, made dull and frankly retch-worthy. At one point an interviewee recites the lyrics to Bikini Kill's Feels Blind and states how much impact they had on her and how she'll never forget them, the only problem being that she actually misquotes them calling into question the credibility of everything else both she and Anderson say. It's not even that Anderson is an Errol Morris or even a Michael Moore type seeking to point out the incongruities of her subjects, it's actually that she doesn't appear to have noticed which has to lead the viewer to wonder about the legitimacy of both her fandom and the entire project. Likewise in the opening minutes she asks several of the involved if they know why Hanna stopped performing in 2005. It's a fitting question seeing as none of them have an answer but Anderson doesn't seem that interested in revealing it and practically forgets about it, not following up or even broaching the subject until about an hour later. At another stage she attempts to laud Hanna as a crucial muse for Nirvana (she was a friend of Kurt Cobain's and inspired the title of Smells Like Teen Spirit, daubing 'Kurt smells like Teen Spirit' on a wall during a drunken binge) which strikes as supremely arrogant. There are occasional good moments - the lack of medical knowledge and refusal to listen to a patient on the behalf of trained medical personal that led to the long extension of Hanna's then undiagnosed illness and a mainstream newspaper falsely claiming that Hanna was raped by her father to try and offer a sexist reasoning for her feminist leanings are both fascinating and disturbing realities about the unreliability of media information (a culture Hanna actively opposed, declaring a media blackout at the heart of her fame) and the sexism of the modern world - but neither are given more than a perfunctory chin-jut of recognition. I'm a fan of Hanna's music and hers is an interesting, important story but Anderson merely sticks to the bare bones, only delving deeper in the final twenty minutes by which time many viewers will have already switched off, having been bored to tears by the tedium of the rest of the film's adoration. On the whole you'd be much better served spending your time and money investing in Hanna's music and searching out footage of her ferociously dazzling live performances, some of which are admittedly used here, because they have far more to proffer than Anderson can summon up.