Simple Plan members, from left: Sebastian Lefebvre, Chuck Comeau, Pierre Bouvier and Jeff Stinco.Skyler Barberio/Supplied
Simple Plan is a band that built a career in spite of itself – or at least in spite of its timing. Their debut pop-punk album came out in 2002, just after the genre changed shape in the late nineties: blink-182 was working with the Cure’s Robert Smith, Sum 41 was embracing metal, and Green Day was making a corny but moving album about the failures of the American dream.
Influenced by these bands but chronologically out of step with them, the Montreal punks embraced what they are reticent to describe, in Didier Charette’s new documentary Simple Plan: The Kids in the Crowd, as a more pop-forward sound. That style worked astonishingly well for them for a while. Until, like many of their peers, they found their concert crowds getting smaller.
The band’s story should be a compelling one to tell. But The Kids in the Crowd glazes over the kind of story Simple Plan deserves, instead tending toward a superficial kind of fan service. At one point in a poutine-serving Quebec restaurant, the film showcases a fan telling front man Pierre Bouvier, “I’m touched that you’re Québécois.”
Quebec’s Simple Plan were part of a wave of 2000s punk bands from Canada who bucked global music trends in tumultuous times for the music industry.Mahé Charpentier/Supplied
This kind of paint-by-numbers heartstring-tugging deprives serious fans of the juicy detail they’d want from a doc about their favourite band. It also doesn’t get to the heart of the real narrative tension Simple Plan faced in the rapidly changing 2000s music industry, when downloading destroyed sales and hip hop climbed atop the charts. This creates an unfortunate coincidence: A band that found opportunity when there was little of it is featured in a documentary that misses its opportunity to tell a truly great story about the band.
That’s not the only opportunity it misses. Charette lingers on the story of Bouvier’s fractured friendship with drummer-slash-driving-force Chuck Comeau in the late nineties, after his departure from their earlier band Reset. Yet this is far from the biggest falling-out between Simple Plan members – bassist David Desrosiers left the band in 2020 following allegations of sexual misconduct.
He was not interviewed onscreen for the documentary, but appears in archival footage throughout. The event barely gets a drive-by mention, with only brief platitudes from the band.
So much else feels confusing. Band members get occasionally emotional, yet the story comes across as sanitized, if not vetted. It was made “with the collaboration of” the band’s management company Coalition Music, which will leave punk fans wondering what consequential stories may have been omitted.
One discussion of the rift between Bouvier and Comeau triggers a brain-breaking time jump set many years ahead of the film’s chronology, confusingly focused on social media content. And when the band members discuss being afraid of how the punk community would react to their poppier direction, it’s followed by a categorically different criticism from NOFX front man Fat Mike, who calls Simple Plan’s debut album, No Pads, No Helmets…Just Balls, “the worst album title I’ve ever heard.”
(He’s right, but that’s the extent of his commentary. Also, the guy once made an album called Heavy Petting Zoo.)
This past year has been massive in terms of cementing 2000s punk history. Ahead of Sum 41’s breakup, front man Deryck Whibley recounted the band’s career in sometimes harrowing detail in his memoir Walking Disaster: My Life Through Heaven and Hell, while journalists Matt Bobkin and Adam Feibel celebrated the gamut of mainstream-reaching Canadian punk in their new book In Too Deep: When Canadian Punks Took Over The World. It’s fantastic that punk legacies are being celebrated. But it may have been inevitable that some artists won’t get the honest stories they deserve.
Simple Plan: The Kids in the Crowd debuted on Prime Video July 8.