H e looks like a human pit bull, says a friend. You don’t have to be a fan of early hardcore punk to enjoy this documentary about the incredible life of Harley Flanagan, founder, bassist and vocalist of the New York band Cro-Mags. By the age of 13, Flanagan was the drummer in the Stimulators, playing with Madness and the Cramps. He was punk’s Artful Dodger, with a bit of Animal from the Muppets thrown in; hammering away behind the drums, bare chested, with a mop of hair. As another talking head puts it: punk didn’t shape him, he shaped punk.

Flanagan was born in 1967 to a drug-addict mother (he was that baby on a dirty mattress on the floor, he says). The poet Allen Ginsberg rescued his mom from a hippy commune; they lived in New York on the pregentrified Lower East Side, which in arch

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