THROW AWAY YOUR BOOKS, RALLY IN THE STREETS

A quasi-episodic synthesis of director Shūji Terayama’s anarchic pop-art shorts and a proto-punk coming-of-age narrative about a disaffected teen’s warped family life, THROW AWAY YOUR BOOKS, RALLY IN THE STREETS offers equal portions of furious provocation and unexpected beauty. It's like Terayama’s Art Theatre Guild forebearer Oshima cranked to eleven, and it's audacious, experimental, juvenile, and thrilling.

The story focuses on a teenager in hopeless search of identity within a highly dysfunctional family and a fractured world which both threaten to devour the boy — demanding everything and not really caring at all. It’s an experimental, psychedelic odyssey through a revolutionary moment in history and a masterpiece of subversive cinema.

“In some of its best moments, it reminds me of something like an unhinged audiovisual progenitor to Iggy Pop’s ‘Turn Blue’ off Lust for Life—discrete scenes soundtracked by psychedelic soul that gradually builds to an epic crescendo while a rhythmic spoken-word monologue reaches a hysterical, primal yowl. If THROW AWAY YOUR BOOKS has a dominant mode, it’s catharsis: ebullient, tortured, hard-wrought, screaming, painful, absurd, and transcendent. As beautiful, heartbreaking, and hilarious as anything I’ve seen in a movie theater this year.” - Jon Dieringer, Screen Slate