Wired For Chaos review – Harley Flanagan’s hard times coming your way

Rock’n’roll is full of hardship stories and tales of excess but few are as incredible as Harley Flanagan’s. Drummer for the punk band Stimulators at the age of 13, and bassist for the frankly ferocious New York hardcore legends Cro Mags shortly after, his first fifty years on the planet were set to a constant theme of rage.

Type his name in Google and you’ll probably see the ridiculously young Harley standing next to Blondie’s Debbie Harry, or him photo bombing Andy Warhol and Joe Strummer. There was, however, a price to be paid for appearing in these snaps. He was born to a mother with a drug addiction, living in a hippy commune before poet Alan Ginsberg rescued them – but only to the 70’s hellhole of the Lower East Side of New York. Harley suffered abuse from all directions. He was as a white working class kid, a minority, picked on by other racial groups in school. He was exposed to drugs at an early age and sexually abused by older acquaintances and yet somehow he carved a path through, unsurprisingly picking up PTSD on the way.

Something of an epiphany happened when the Stimulators played in Belfast (they were not able to tour Britain due to Harley’s age). He saw white working class skinhead kids with an attitude for the first tine and shaved his head, becoming the Harley recognisable from the Cro Mags. There’s plenty of of other stories too, including being set upon by former band mates but the film has a ultimately positive spin on a true survivor, an artful dodger character who has made it to his 60’s despite all the odds.

The screening at Brixton’s Ritzy cinema was accompanied by a Q and A hosted by the editor of Vive Le Rock, Eugene Butcher, featuring Harley, his wife Laura and ‘Wired For Chaos’ director Rex Miller. We learnt Miller knew nothing of Harley’s story but had been intrigued by those early photographs (his previous film was a biopic of legendary tennis player Arthur Ashe). We also heard more on Laura’s story of going to see Harley incarcerated in Ryker Island and how she acted as his defence and their relationship now. ‘Wired for Chaos’ tells of an exceptional life, we’ve barely scratched the surface here. In cinemas now for the full story on jiujitsu, death threats, crystal meth and all the rest.