Stream It Or Skip It?

Simple Plan: The Kids in the Crowd, now streaming on Prime Video, brings it all the way back to the Montreal basement where the band, still babies, used to practice. It’s an early version of “Perfect” they’re bashing on, before the doc fast-forwards a few years and it becomes a hit single from No Pads, No Helmets…Just Balls, Simple Plan’s twice-platinum 2002 debut. And as the doc bounces between origin story and longevity – from the basement to the Warped Tour and onward through MTV stardom and their inevitable confrontation with changing tastes and clashing personalities – Kids in the Crowd makes a case that it took 25 years for these guys to finally figure out what was Simple about their Plan in the first place. Luminaries of the early Aughts music scene appear throughout, including Avril Lavigne, Mark Hoppus, Mark McGrath, and Joel Madden.    

The Gist: “I think in some ways it’s what made us into a ‘pop’ pop-punk band, instead of a ‘punk’ pop-punk band.” Simple Plan singer Pierre Bouvier is talking about the band’s decision to join Avril Lavigne’s Try to Shut Me Up tour in 2002. Back then, the “punk cred” vs. “fuckin’ sellout” discourse was endlessly exhausting, and that was without social media even being a thing. But because they’re still out here being a band, and appearing in a doc that marks their 25th anniversary, the discussion now takes on a philosophical air. What did Simple Plan mean, beyond their professed love for the influences – Offspring, Green Day, NOFX, etc. – that they adored in skate in snowboard videos? The dates with Avril were huge for them – Lavigne pops up in Kids in the Crowd with some memories from the tour – and the exposure launched them into MTV’s TRL-osphere. But it would take years of winning over surly crowds on the Warped Tour, and a songwriting evolution that brought them closer to their biggest fans’ hearts – Bouvier calls the 2004 Still Not Getting Any… single “Welcome to My Life” one of his favorite, most affecting songs – to solidify their niche on the pop-punk mountain.

The early going of Kids in the Crowd is fueled mostly by archival home video footage, much of it shot by friend of the band and videographer Patrick Langlois, and plenty of interviews with Bouvier, drummer Chuck Comeau, and guitarists Jeff Stinco and Sébastien Lefebvre. How they met, how the band’s sound came together, and how they hustled to secure a record deal, which finally arrived via Lava/Atlantic. There are a few nice moments with Bouvier’s and Comeau’s parents. But as Simple Plan’s grindset continues, and their notoriety grows, the doc comes back to this question of legitimacy. Fat Mike, founder of Simple Plan’s heroes NOFX, calls No Pads, No Helmets…Just Balls a marketing gimmick more than an album title.

As the doc sets their early years against shots from their latest headlining world tour, it’s clear they rose above the outside static. But in its zeal to track those basement jams and the band’s pop-punk rise, Kids in the Crowd spends less time with when things got awkward inside the group, and barely addresses the 2020 departure of original bassist David Desrosiers, after allegations of sexual misconduct surfaced online and in the Quebec music community.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of? Two other docs about Canadian artists come to mind here, including Jagged, part of Max’s Music Box anthology – and a film publicly denounced by its subject, Alanis Morissette – and Hate to Love, which tries to reckon with Nickelback’s own longevity in a pop culture landscape that thinks they stink.   

Performance Worth Watching: Seated interviews for the documentary take place separately. But throughout, a sense of the Simple Plan dynamic emerges, that of a push-pull between drummer Chuck Comeau and vocalist Pierre Bouvier, with the other guys sort of commenting on it from the margins. Bouvier even acknowledges it directly, in a somewhat startling moment of candor. “I’ve learned over the years when to put my foot down. You know, for this documentary, you probably have realized Chuck is the driving force behind so much of what we need to do. And Chuck doesn’t have the same pressures that I have.”  

Memorable Dialouge: Leslie Simon, former editor at Alternative Press: “Simple Plan was never cool, unfortunately. We called them GGBB, Good Guys Bad Band.” Their music, Simon continues, “appeared formulaic.”

Sex and Skin: None. Not even any rock star debauchery. Well, at one point, the Simple Plan dudes do throw a television off a roof. But no shenanigans are revealed.

Our Take: Simple Plan: The Kids in the Crowd has a deep well of footage to explore, dating back to the band’s earliest days. As friend, fan, and honorary band member Patrick Langlois says in the doc, “I had a videocamera, and as you can see by these archives, I learned myself.” Clips from early club shows, antics on tour, the bandmembers fucking with each other in recording studios, at press events, and in Warped Tour parking lots. Which, if you’re a huge Simple Plan head, will provide points of view you probably haven’t seen. The issue for us is that rich access to total randomness is a two-way street. And in this case, Kids in the Crowd suffers from a syndrome we have just named: And Then This Happened.

How many grainy clips of guys goofing around in big jean shorts, eyeliner, and Atticus T-shirts does one doc really need? After a while, it feels like Kids in the Crowd has included too many, and it seems to falter, or at least plateau, at a point where that footage would meet some of the deeper themes it only touches on. This is not to say the doc is not entertaining, or enlightening – Pierre Bouvier has a frontman’s version of Main Character Energy, Chuck Comeau is clearly a very driven person, and Jeff Stinco and Sébastien Lefebvre seem more thoughtful than the film really gives them time for. And we don’t really know if there’s any documentary stuff in the works about Good Charlotte’s run in the spotlight, but the quotes from Joel Madden in here feel ripe for further exploration. “The pop thing…can fuck you up,” Madden says, and the camera lingers on his thousand-yard rock star stare.

Our Call: The Kids in the Crowd is a for-sure STREAM IT for Simple Plan superfans. They will thrill to a lot of its included archival footage; they might even appear in the fan testimonials section. For everybody else, this doc is like a speed-run through 25 years in the changing face of music and its marketing, with Simple Plan staying remarkably consistent within it.

Johnny Loftus (@johnnyloftus.bsky.social) is a Chicago-based writer. A veteran of the alternative weekly trenches, his work has also appeared in Entertainment Weekly, Pitchfork, The All Music Guide, and The Village Voice.