Sometimes it occurs to me with a jolting shock that I've seen a lot of films in my life. Many of these, like this one, were with my roommate in college, who was a certified movie freak. Although I forgot about it until I recently bought it for myself, one of the movies I liked a lot back circa 1999 was SLC Punk. As it rapidly segues from hilarious to touching, tragic to gross, ultimately SLC Punk shows it has a message beneath its surface noise, and it says a lot as it unfolds. At its center SLC Punk asks the question "is buying-in always selling-out?" To translate that for the uninitiated, that means is following cultural norms always a betrayal of personal identify and youthful dreams? Stevo and his best friend "Heroin" Bob (who ironically never touches drugs and is terrified of needles) are two young men living in uber-right wing Salt Lake City during the mid-Reagan years. They do their best to be hard core punks in a time and place where that pursuit separates them from just about everyone else in their Mormon dominated society. Steveo, though, is more than he seems. Amid his binge drinking, ambushing of local rednecks, and philosophical asides on the healthiness of personal anarchy, Steveo, it turns out, is a brilliant student who has the chance to get into an Ivy League college. His father, a smooth-talking Yuppie jerk, does his best to persuade his son to accept the Harvard education open to him, even as the life Steveo believes in proclaims that path to be the ultimate in "selling out." Along the way between its memorable opening scene and its closing credits viewers of SLC Punk meet a cast of characters that includes a rebel who disguises himself as a conforming prep, a trust-fund Eurotrash psychopath, a hippie Wiccan woman, and, well...one case of skin infection so bizarre it even stumps medical science. SLC Punk is worth seeing, owning, and heck, even spending ten minutes reviewing on Amazon.com. So go get it. Go get it now.