July 19, 2025

by Ann Powers

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This week, our critic is thinking about the fight between a certain duo of intrepid Daily Planet reporters about the true nature of punk rock, and finding both arguments persuasive.

Jessica Miglio/Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc.

Hello super friends,

Like so many hope-seeking people sweating out this summer, I plunked down my dollars to see director James Gunn’s Superman last weekend. I showed up for the superpup Krypto, but found the old-fashioned Earth-saving shebang to be a balm — a sweet shot of moral clarity at a time when that can seem to be in short supply. And I joined the chorus of surprised chuckles when the scene destined to go viral arrived. In it, reporter Lois Lane and her metahuman lover are sharing a moment of vulnerability that turns into a low-stakes but highly revelatory argument. Wondering what he sees in her, she calls herself “just some punk rock kid from Bakerline,” to which he indignantly responds, “I’m punk rock!” Then they’re off, thrown into one of rock and roll’s classic showdowns, between a “real” punk who found her tribe in the underground and a former clueless kid who probably bought his first Ramones t-shirt and Green Day CD at Target. It’s a great early-in-the-relationship values check, as two people still feeling each other out voice their anxieties in the form of a tussle over definitions.

The scene is one of the movie’s best partly because actor David Corenswet is so good at showing the gentle boy inside the Man of Steel, but also because it resurrects one of rock’s fundamental debates, one that echoes beyond music borders. “Are you a real punk?” was a question some voiced from the genre’s very start, reflecting the confrontational nature of a determinedly anti-establishment movement. By the early 1990s, the kids who didn’t fit into the club but were still drawn to it had a subgenre of their own, “pop-punk,” to embrace and defend. Young Clark Kent was a pop-punk fan before he discovered his superpowers: a small town dreamer who discovered his favorite bands on commercial radio and likely found hardcore types like Lois pretty scary.

In reality, punk with strong melodies and a romantic streak has been interwoven into the genre since its beginnings, thanks to girl group lovers the Ramones and Blondie and the Beatlesque Buzzcocks; only over time did this approach beget an industry complete with arena-filling artists and shops, festivals and media outlets dedicated to spreading its influence. That’s when pop-punk entered its paradoxical huge-but-uncool period, which continued into Clark’s teen years.

Superman’s cinematic spat over what makes someone “punk” hit close to home. Like Lois, I was once a kid yelling “Question Authority!” at all-ages shows who turned toward journalism to maintain that rebel spirit. Yet, like Superman, I have a Clark Kent side, since I was also a nerd who ripped up her t-shirts after buying them at the mall. Throughout my life, despite a youthful stumble into a professional writing job that turned into a lifelong vocation, the girl who wasn’t punk enough has lived on within my own brain, making me want to defend cultural underdogs everywhere. I think a lot of people have felt belittled because of their cultural preferences at one time or another, and that’s the reason Superman’s musical cluelessness charms so hard. The slogan “kindness is punk” has been meme-ified, but Lois’s first challenge aims for Superman’s tastes, not his virtues: she’s discerning, while he is indiscriminate. “You trust everyone and think everyone you ever met is, like, beautiful,” she says. To which he replies that maybe that — open-heartedness in the face of others’ cynicism, and even the courage to have questionable taste — is the real punk rock.

TikTok is overflowing with people’s elaborations on what Superman’s version of punk looks like in their lives; “maybe using your turn signal is the new punk rock,” says one. But let’s stick with that issue of discernment for a minute. The most iconic movie hero of 2025 can likely have an old pair of Doc Martens in his closet because of where punk has gone since its origins in the decade when Christopher Reeve owned the role.

Its contradictions were inherent from the start. Early punk was both fully anti-establishment and commercially ambitious, built on notions of outsiderness that quickly proved exclusionary to some. Esteemed punk scholar Gina Arnold writes in her Substack reaction to Superman, “initially punk’s violence was all a reaction to square people’s bigoted need to attack them: indeed, ‘they started it’ could have been punk rock’s motto.” She goes on to say that the standards of purity that took over the genre — Lois’s argument against her pop-loving beau’s bona fides — were always specious. But “they started it,” a phrase that instantly establishes an “us and them” situation, is where punk’s problems started, too. It’s why the very prejudices that punk challenged also took root within it, with punk scenes battling internal racism, sexism and homophobia since day one. “Why do punk rock boys go out with new wave girls?” the proto pop-punk band Great Plains lamented in 1985’s “Letter to a Fanzine,” and as a girl who was always into both the Cars and Crass, I experienced the judgment contained in that question.

Superman, though, is pop-punk, in a way that represents the genre’s status now. His favorite band is the fictional Mighty Crabjoys, a Green Day style hitmaker with a woman singer voiced by actor Lou Lou Safran and a theme song that mashes up elements from throughout the genre’s history (the “oi oi oi” chorus is an interesting redemption, given the “oi” subgenre’s complicated relationship to white supremacy.) He also likes the esteemed Christian Latino nu-metal band P.O.D. He’s the embodiment of a 21st century music lover who only knows the punk that had already adjusted to the Top 40, bleeding into other genres and making room for an expanded cast of players. He’d happily scream his head off at an Olivio Rodrigo concert and has probably seen American Idiot, the musical, three times. I love the gender switch in making Lois the snob in the couple, a sweet echo of the short-lived streaming show based on the indie rock bible High Fidelity, which cast Zoë Kravitz as the scornful record store clerk once played by John Cusack. Girls and theater kids rule punk in the 21st century mainstream, where it’s been institutionalized within rock camps and Target t-shirt racks, and Gunn’s Superman loves that.

Superman’s pop-punk affiliations aren’t just baked into this film to attract the younger sisters of original Green Day fans. His taste makes “kindness is the new punk” possible. A key scene comes late in the film, when Lois joins Clark at his adoptive parents’ Midwest home, where he is recovering from a life-threatening battle. In the childhood bedroom his folks have lovingly preserved, she spies a Mighty Crabjoys poster on the wall. That poster is a portal. It transports Lois to another world, one replicated in suburbs and small towns across America since 1989, when the foremost purveyor of band T-shirts and clip-on piercings, Hot Topic, opened its first Southern California mall store. Clearly, tweenage Clark bought his poster at a Hot Topic, or else at the merch table during a Warped Tour stop as his parents waited in their Ford Explorer in the parking lot. His outsiderness is existential, but it’s not the existential kind. As an alien, an adopted child, and a genuine nerd saddled with the body of a jock, the young Clark Kent had plenty of internal struggles and probably some social ones; they just weren’t the kind that punk had originally celebrated. Pop-punk is what expanded the genre’s definition to make room for kids whose edges were perceived as softer, not fully formed.

Throughout Superman’s long mythical life, his outsiderness has been defined in different ways. Created by two Jewish teens in the 1930s, he was a Moses figure who morphed into a Jesus figure, an All-American full of “wheatfield swagger” who became the gentlest player in the comics universe’s post-Reagan era dystopian turn. (This Lit Hub piece explains how the superhero became a Christ figure, and Stephanie Zacharek’s excellent overview in Time assesses the hero’s more recent shifts within the blockbuster realm.) Gunn revamps the character that Zacharek notes is “for everyone” to suit his own style, which is itself very pop-punk. Gunn grew up playing in bands that upheld the legacy of Midwestern art weirdos like the Human Switchboard and the Embarrassment. Going Hollywood, he retained the comical transgressiveness of that style of punk along with its capacity for absorbing pop elements.

Gunn is a big playlist maker, and on the ones he’s created for Superman’s characters on Spotify he shows off his wide-ranging tastes, connecting Lois to critics’ faves like Car Seat Headrest and allies and nemeses like Mr. Terrific and Ultraman to prog and Japanese metal. Clark Kent’s playlist features the Mighty Crabjoys alongside original punk soft boys like Mick Jones of the Clash, always the girls’ favorite despite the rugged handsomeness of band leader Joe Strummer, and makes a bid to redeem Warped Tour era pop-punk in the name of kindness.

For all the freedom and confidence pop-punk instilled in young mallgoers, its history has been marred by the sexual abuse allegations that haunt the history of the Warped Tour in particular and many of its leading 21st century bands’ discographies. Very early punk was male dominated but open to women — bands like The Raincoats and stars like Debbie Harry and Alice Bag claimed the space for loud, nonconformist women that its anti-glamor aesthetic opened up. But California hardcore and the skate culture-connected scenes that followed formed the basis for the Warped Tour set that re-established young men’s rule. Even though pop-punk progenitor Green Day was born of a queer and women-driven West Berkeley community, most of the bands who defined its commercial rise in the 1990s were unapologetically cocky, if not outright sexist.

I covered the first few Warped Tours for The New York Times, and I remember the shift from a wholesome family vibe to a melée where acts like Blink-182 and Kid Rock led throngs of boys in the chant, “Show us your tits!” Such transgressions were often passed off as humor, and Gunn himself experienced how that can backfire when, a few years ago, a bunch of offensive social media posts making light of AIDS, the Holocaust and pedophilia, among other things, resurfaced and nearly cost him his career. He learned his lesson, and Superman’s rehabilitation of pop-punk as pure kindness is part of his penance, not erasing history so much as determinedly rejecting a path that proved destructive.

Punk has always held many elements within its sphere. It has made room for conflicting political stances and complex webs of human behavior. Today kindness is a value many punks uphold, alongside pragmatic skill-building, mutual aid, self-criticism, a strong work ethic and the courage it takes to imagine a life that may never bring huge material rewards but will support the health and dignity of everyone. In the mainstream, punk remains a signifier of rebellion; on a more grassroots level it has been reinvigorated within women and queer-led communities exploring its foundation in anarchist and socialist ethics and mutual aid. Returning to the genre’s proverbial birthplaces — all-ages venues, zines, community radio stations — 21st century punks have been working to put compassion and care first. He’d have to check his ego at the door, but I think Clark Kent, even as Superman, would feel welcome in such spaces. Radical empathy is a core part of the genre’s history, and because its current adherents have confronted the elements in the genre that were aggressively harmful, it’s making a comeback. Tending to each other makes trust possible.

That’s a lesson Lois, the authentic punk turned ethical journalist, might teach her supercharged boyfriend. In a different new-couple fight the pair have, she questions the occasional carelessness of his do-good rampages; it’s a point of pride for him that he hasn’t killed innocent people (yet), but his disruption of global political systems (not to mention the environment — that’s a lotta smashed landscape, dude) could be tempered by some forethought. Kindness can be punk, and punk is at its kindest when its beautiful spontaneous energy is wrapped in the awareness that everybody’s edges are a little different, and deserve respect.

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Here are a few things that have been lifting me into the air in a warm embrace just like the end of Superman lately

One last layer of James Gunn’s pop-punk fun: the song that closes Superman is “Punkrocker,” a 2006 novelty song by a bunch of Swedish studio musicians who went by the name Teddybears, and it perfectly parodies the macho side of punk that his sweet Superman can’t grasp. Enjoy this video featuring the immortal Iggy Pop being driven around Times Square.
Did reading this email make you want to hear some punk rock? Two offerings: the new album from the legendary Gina Birch, cofounder of The Raincoats, is extremely fun; and Atlanta’s own crew of former juvenile delinquents Upchuck has released a string of killer singles, so look for its debut album October 3.
Thanks to my pal Whitney Pastorek at Nashville’s City Cast for turning me on to the Girl Tones. All women White Stripes? Yessss.
Like so many people, I’ve been looking to vintage cultural offerings to provide a break from the merciless news cycle. This week I’m hanging out a lot with 1970s Elliott Gould. If you haven’t seen Robert Altman’s 1973 version of the noir classic The Long Goodbye, in which Gould communes with a cat and rarely shakes the ash from his cigarette, it’s on the Criterion Channel until August 1. And here are two wonderful essays about why this anti-establishment star remains so alluring.
I’m still on the fence about Lena Dunham’s rom-com redux Too Much, but I welcomed this essay about the “funny fat lady” trope from film critic Alison Willmore.
If, like me, you are only eating cold foods during this endless heat wave, I recommend this salad dressing. It takes a bit of work but it’s worth it.

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