Dogs in Space

A squat in Melbourne, 1978: discernible among the roaches, mouldering cans of beans, Eno albums and the odd sheep, are the truly terrible punk band Dogs in Space, a gaggle of hippies, students and nurses, and sundry visitors including a chainsaw fanatic and two strangely amiable cops. Into this seething heap drifts the Girl, a taciturn waif whose perceptions of the house's giggling, garrulous grotesques form the narrative springboard for Lowenstein's admirably adventurous film. No mere rock movie, it is a remarkably rich portrait both of a much-maligned subculture and of the end of an era: story, for the most part, is held at bay, with the vividly realised fragments as apparently chaotic yet as tautly structured as Nashville. Lowenstein generously but unsentimentally allows his initially irritating, immature characters to become interesting and sympathetic. A funny, elegiac, uplifting, and deliciously different movie.