Kill Your Idols then takes a misguided swerve into the current downtown New York rock scene, so that it can spend more time preaching about the anarchy of the good old days than it does revealing them.

The documentary enters more dubious territory when it tries to present today's more consumer-friendly post-punkers (like the Strokes and Yeah Yeah Yeahs) as some sort of successors.

...an atonal love letter to a single corner of the culture - one built, in the words of singer Lydia Lunch, on 'beauty and truth and filth.'

This is little more than a sketchy portrait of two fascinating cultural moments with only geography and 70-ish minutes of celluloid connecting them.