Pump Up the Volume

Mark Hunter has moved to a new town in Arizona and speaks to nobody at school. At night he runs a pirate radio broadcast from his room and, as Hard Harry, says everything: the school administration, parents, sex, hopelessness. Every teenager in town listens and nobody knows who he is. The subject is not rebellion but the weight of speech. A listener writes to say he is going to kill himself and Mark answers him on air; it ends badly. The best passage is the moment Mark realises how powerful his own voice is and is frightened by it. The form is night and darkness: a garage, a transmitter, a microphone. The rhythm of the narrative is tied entirely to the broadcast schedule. The production also carries another school matter: the principal is expelling difficult students from the records to raise the average, which corresponds to a practice that genuinely occurred in American public schools. The soundtrack was assembled from independent bands, unusual for the time, and the album drew attention in its own right. Allan Moyle wrote and directed. Christian Slater plays Mark and Samantha Mathis the girl who finds him. Who it is for: viewers who like youth films and stories about pirate broadcasting. Who it is not for: anyone bothered by an ending that resolves too easily; the film clears up the problem it raised very fast in its last section.