I arrived in New York City in 1993 with visions of a raw downtown scene populated by characters I had read about and heard on records. I actually weaseled my way into a bit of a scene, following around the musicians I had idolized from afar. Seeing John Zorn, Arto Lindsay, The Lounge Lizards, Zeena Parkins, Marc Ribot, Bill Frisell, Joey Baron, and others play live was like a dream come true. The afterglow wore off, my best efforts to fall in love with NYC failed, and the more mundane realities of city life started creeping in. Watching Llik Your Idols, I realize that part of my problem came from being late to the party. The downtown scene in '93 was obviously a pale shadow of what happened during the '80s. The enduring musical acts I mentioned were settling into their creative midlife, and the special brand of cinema profiled in this documentary was inspiring a new generation of young filmmakers.

Llik Your Idols is a great documentary, because it manages to retain the utterly shocking quality of the work it studies. It's amazing that films from the likes of Richard Kern, Nick Zedd, and Beth B can still be shocking so many years later. Watching Kern and Zedd in their interviews, one sees almost no self-congratulatory impulse, but these guys deserve major back-slapping for creating art that cannot be co-opted or easily classified almost 30 years later. At the same time, it's hard not to feel some pity for people like Joe Coleman that are clearly out of sync with society. Lydia Lunch describes Coleman during one of her segments in Llik Your Idols as a kind of inspired throwback, rooting out other oddities and freaks because nothing else in life interests him. This quality makes for interesting art, but doesn't feel like the recipe for a satisfied, whole person. Director Angelique Bosio remains perfectly neutral in her coverage, staying above judgment and giving plenty of screen time to the artists, as well as the critics.

If you are easily offended, you should steer clear of Llik Your Idols. Most of the work here makes otherwise controversial material like John Waters' films look G-rated. Commentary by critics that this so-called "Cinema of Transgression" or "No Wave Cinema" inspired pornography and the many flavors of hyper-sexualized media we now see around us rings very true. Pornography has always been explicit, toward the end of stimulating sexual desire. The creative expression from the artists featured in Llik Your Idols lends a kind of depravity and emptiness to sex that results in the opposite type of stimulation. Everything sexual here feels like a cross between a bad dream and a bad acid trip. The word catharsis, used reluctantly during one of the interviews, seems a good explanation for how people used film and music to transfer their pain, anger, and other raw emotion. What Llik Your Idols makes clear is that the volume of activity in New York during the '80s, this confluence of like-minded individuals, and the unique political conditions that added fuel to their creative protest fires, may never exist again in quite the same form.

Most of the players involved in Llik Your Idols are still around, doing their thing. Most of them are still in New York. If, like me, you take the tour and come away a bit disappointed, try viewing Llik Your Idols for a shot in the arm of what the truly bleeding edge looked like at one point in time, in downtown New York.