Ladies and Gentlemen, The Fabulous Stains: The Punk-Girl-Band Cult

The most quietly devastating scene in this film has no music in it. A local television reporter interviews a teenage girl whose aunt cannot control her and whose mother has recently died, and the girl — Corinne Burns, played by Diane Lane at about sixteen — looks into the camera and delivers a piece of pure provocation about not being anybody’s anything. The reporter has what he came for. The clip goes out. And the film understands, in 1982, something the culture would not catch up with for three decades: the clip is the career. She has no band worth the name, no songs and no ability. She has a face, a camera, and forty seconds, and it turns out that is the entire requirement.

Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Stains was directed by Lou Adler, a record producer of some standing who had made Carole King’s Tapestry and had produced The Rocky Horror Picture Show. It was written by Nancy Dowd, who had won an Academy Award for the story of Coming Home and had written Slap Shot, and who took her name off this one and replaced it with the pseudonym Rob Morton. It received effectively no release in 1982. It was rescued, over the following decade, by USA Network’s Night Flight, which played it in the small hours to whoever was awake, and that is how it became the film that a generation of women in bands cite when asked where they started.

The setup

Corinne’s mother has died. She lives with an aunt in a depressed steel town and works a job she loses on camera. She forms a band with her sister Tracy and their cousin Jessica — Marin Kanter and a very young Laura Dern — and the band is called the Stains, and the Stains cannot play.

They get onto a package tour at the bottom of the bill, beneath a fading American metal act fronted by Fee Waybill’s Lou Corpse, and beneath a British punk band called the Looters. The Looters are fronted by Ray Winstone as Billy, and staffed — this is the detail that makes the film a permanent artefact — by Paul Simonon of the Clash and Steve Jones and Paul Cook of the Sex Pistols, playing punk musicians on a tour bus with the ease of men who have never done anything else.

Corinne watches Billy work an audience, takes what she needs, and constructs the Stains’ act out of a look — skunk-striped hair, red eye make-up, a see-through blouse — and a slogan: we don’t put out. Girls in the next town arrive dressed as her. Then the next town. The film’s second half is about what happens to a movement that was invented on Tuesday.

Why it works: Adler films the audience

Adler is not a natural director and the film has the rough edges to prove it. He does one thing supremely well, and it is the thing the film needed.

He points the camera at the crowd. Repeatedly, and for longer than is comfortable. When the Stains play, Adler cuts away from the stage to the girls in the room, and you watch the look propagate in real time across a series of provincial venues — three skunks in the first town, a dozen in the second, a hall full by the third. There is no montage explaining that a craze is spreading. You simply see more of them, week by week, and the arithmetic does the work.

This is a record producer’s instinct rather than a film-maker’s, and it is exactly right. Adler had spent his professional life watching what an audience does with a product, and he shoots the Stains’ rise as a distribution phenomenon: the look travels faster than the music because the look is copyable and the music is not. A girl in Ohio cannot reproduce a guitar part from a broadcast. She can reproduce a hairstyle from a photograph in an afternoon.

The other thing Adler gets right is refusing to improve the band. The Stains stay bad. In almost any other film about a rise, the group would acquire competence around the second act as a reward for perseverance, because that is the shape audiences expect. Dowd’s script denies it flatly, and the denial is the argument. Corinne’s ascent has nothing to do with music, so music cannot be the thing that gets better.

And Lane is extraordinary. She plays Corinne as a child who has discovered a weapon and has no framework for what it does — imperious in front of a camera, lost the instant it turns off — and the performance is entirely without vanity. At sixteen she is playing a person constructing a persona, which requires her to act badly on purpose in precisely calibrated ways, and she never misses the line.

The real ancestor

The obvious comparisons are the rock films — A Hard Day’s Night and its descendants, or the fake-band pictures. The genuine parent is Peter Watkins’s Privilege from 1967, which almost nobody has seen and which everybody arguing about this film should.

Watkins’s premise: a pop star is manufactured, and church and state discover that a manufactured idol is the most efficient instrument of social control available, so they use him. It is a cold, formally strange film about pop stardom as an engineered object, and it treats the audience’s devotion as raw material for whoever holds the contract.

The Fabulous Stains inherits the thesis and inverts the ownership, which is why it has aged better than Watkins’s film. In Privilege, institutions manufacture the star. In the Stains, the star manufactures herself, from nothing, out of a television interview — and the institutions arrive afterwards, panting, to buy her. That is a genuinely prophetic revision. Watkins imagined a future in which power builds an idol. Adler and Dowd imagined the actual one, in which a teenager builds the idol first and power turns up with a contract, and by then she has already lost control of it to the girls who copied her.

Corinne Burns is an influencer, in 1982, complete with the rest of the mechanism: the imitators who dilute her, the male establishment act that resents her for skipping the queue, and the accusation of fraudulence that arrives the moment she is big enough to be worth destroying.

How it survived

The distribution history is part of the text, and it is worth spelling out, because the film’s afterlife rhymes with its plot in a way that is almost too neat.

Having failed in cinemas, the picture found its audience through late-night cable — Night Flight running it unannounced at hours when the only people watching were teenagers who had stayed up, in bedrooms, alone, across a country. That is precisely the propagation mechanism the film describes. Nobody marketed the Stains to those girls. The image travelled on its own, one household at a time, from a broadcast, exactly as Corinne’s skunk stripe travels from town to town inside the story.

By the early 1990s, women who had seen it that way were forming bands and citing it, and the riot grrrl scene adopted the film as founding scripture — which meant a picture about a fake movement became genuinely load-bearing for a real one. Corinne Burns could not play a note and inspired a generation of people who could. The film spent a decade being unavailable, traded on degraded tapes, and grew more influential the harder it was to see, which is the one form of authenticity Corinne never manages to fake.

The case against

Dowd disowned it, and her reasons are legible in the finished picture. The film has been reshaped in ways that fight its own script, most obviously at the end, and the tonal control that a writer of Slap Shot would have insisted on is absent in stretches. Scenes land in the wrong order. The Looters’ subplot and the Stains’ rise never quite interlock, and Winstone — who is very good — is playing a character whose function keeps changing.

The bigger problem is that the film cannot decide how much talent Corinne has. The thesis requires her to have none, and Adler occasionally loses his nerve and shoots her as though she is magnetic on stage rather than merely visible. Those moments betray the argument.

And it looks cheap in the wrong places. A film about the propagation of an image needs its images to be strong, and the concert photography is often flat and badly lit, which matters more here than it would elsewhere.

The verdict

It is a flawed film with a permanently correct idea inside it, and the idea is worth more than a hundred well-made pictures about bands. Everything the culture would spend the next forty years discovering about self-manufacture, virality and the speed at which a movement gets copied into meaninglessness is on screen in 1982, being played by a sixteen-year-old and a bassist from the Clash.

Pair it with Times Square, made two years earlier, which is the same story told with tenderness instead of a scalpel — two runaway girls, a city, a media machine, and a studio that cut it to pieces. The two films are a matched set, and both were mutilated by the same instinct. For the lineage, find Privilege. For the pure pleasure of a band picture that just wants to blow something up, Rock ’n’ Roll High School is the antidote. The Stains has been on disc since the late 2000s after decades of tape-trading, and it is a genuinely good transfer of a film that spent its life looking terrible.

Spoilers below

Corinne is exposed, and the exposure is the film’s best sequence. Billy, who has watched a girl with no songs sell out rooms he cannot fill, denounces her publicly as a fraud — she has taken the Looters’ material, she cannot play, the whole edifice is a costume — and the fans who dressed as her that morning turn on her within a single scene. The speed is the point. A movement assembled in a fortnight out of hairspray and a slogan takes about ninety seconds to dissolve, because nobody in it had any investment beyond the look, and the look is now embarrassing.

Lane plays the collapse without a shred of self-pity, and if the film ended there it would be a small masterpiece: a bleak, exact account of what a manufactured phenomenon is worth when the manufacturing is revealed.

It does not end there. The studio appended a coda, made without Dowd, in which the Stains reappear some time later as a polished, professional, MTV-ready act in a slick promotional clip, triumphant and completely defanged.

It is a betrayal of the script and it is also, by accident, the most accurate ending the film could have had. The machine that Corinne outran for one summer simply waited, absorbed her, gave her the production values and took the danger out, and sold her back to the girls who had copied her. Dowd was right to be furious. The coda proves her thesis by committing the crime on camera.