Pump Up The Volume

Director: Allan Moyle

1990 / 102min / 35mm

In the halls of his Phoenix high school, Mark Hunter is a tight-lipped loner, but by night, broadcasting a FM pirate station from his parents’ basement, he becomes an unbridled fount of profane, punkish energy, a spokesperson for his fellow students’ repressed rage filling the airwaves with left-of-the-dial tracks by a laundry list of ’80s underground favorites. Tough and tender, Slater slays in this anti-authoritarian cinematic anthem from Times Square director Moyle, a film that seems to anticipate the liberating anonymity of the early internet.

Print courtesy of the Academy Film Archive.