Director: Lisa Hukker
Running time: 33mins
Glock ’45: The Movie is a film of contradictions.
It sets out to peel back the layers of a hyper-theatrical country-satire outfit to tell the story of the people behind it; but leaves a host of important questions unanswered – or often unasked. It pledges to examine the moments when friendship and ambition clash; while ultimately presenting a frictionless world, where a potentially controversial musical act face only the most minimal of pushback.
But it is also a film which will leave you grinning in spite of yourself; becoming increasingly invested in the jamming sessions which eventually yield the film’s climactic song; and rooting for the ensemble cast of artists and eccentrics that make up Glock ’45. And at times, the lines between documentary and mockumentary blur, due to the performative nature of things – so when April comes round, I look forward to seeing the confused faces of Indy Film Library audiences, as they try to figure out if this a This is Spinal Tap scenario or not.
On the balance of things, then, I think inviting documentarian Lisa Hukker into the midst of the band seems to have been a great success. At least in terms of advertising the existence of an extremely likeable team of creatives, and their ‘family’ – including the supporting crew, and a select band of super-fans, who follow the act everywhere. Whether you feel the success is a feat of objective filmmaking may be more up for discussion, though.
For the uninitiated, Glock ’45 is a musical collective based in Hoorn, a small town in the Netherlands. Amid the lockdown period of the pandemic, the band’s “founding fathers” found themselves with time to kill – and began dreaming about a satirical country band, where each of them adopted a hillbilly alter ego. Much of this hinged around discussions between lead-singer Pieter Tensen (who goes by Prickle-bush Pete on stage), and Mike van Harskamp (known simply as Smikkel) .
Unlike many a lockdown era dream (I am yet to actually write any of the cabin-fever-fuelled ideas around a zombie script I convinced myself were dynamite), they assembled their friends and actually did it. That is quite an achievement in itself – and perhaps should serve as a sign to all of us, even our most insane-sounding ideas can become a reality, if we can bear to collaborate with other people who might occasionally disagree with us, or bring ideas of their own to the table. In this case, the idea took shape beyond rambling in-jokes with the introduction of Jade “White Trash” Welling – violin virtuoso, and partner of Tensen – to the line-up; immediately helping to crystalise the band’s sound.
After experimenting with funk and other guitar music, the country satire of Glock ’45 was born – along with a raucous repertoire of songs including Hollar, The Porn Song, and their latest, Donkey Donald. That last hit is the one which the band spend the duration of the film shaping – and serves to put a cap on the whole journey – with the performers basking in the adoration of a sizeable crowd, at a music festival in their hometown.
The triumphant final performance is enjoyable, with enjoyably puerile lyrics sending up Donald Trump, Joe Biden and the American state. But at its heart, there is something a little hollow about it. That’s not just because the music we hear is never the actual live performance, either. (It’s the studio version of each song, piped over the performance; and while it might be clearer for us listening, it is a sad choice, which deprives some clearly electric performances of the atmosphere and weight that they had; not to mention the punkish edge that a sanitised studio version just can’t provide.) No, the bigger problem is that up until this final victory, the journey is a little lacking in drama, honestly.
This is a band that presumably has faced pushback before from every angle. It revels in vulgarity, with songs about pornography and merchandise including a red cap which reads “Make Heroin Great Again”. While it centres on a musical genre that has unfortunately become increasingly associated with conservatism, it features a lead singer who performs at each show in drag, and who suggests a sitting president is a farmyard animal who thinks the world is his own personal toilet. And at the same time, it does lean into making costumes out of someone else’s culture.
There are two vague hints at any kind of friction involving the project. The first is a moment early on, when Glock ’45 is preparing to play a gig at Amsterdam’s ‘Pride is a Protest’ event – when the organisers (who booked the band in the first place) complain about the US flags they put up for their set. With the US’ government now at the head of a global far-right movement to attack the LGBT+ community, these visuals – whether they are meant earnestly, or part of an ironic critique of American ideology – are as welcome as a fart in a spacesuit.
While Pricklebush Pete concedes the point, he grumbles as the flags come down that even if you ignore the context, America is a country of 300 million people – including its own LGBT+ community – so to treat any of its national symbols as inherently problematic is itself an unhelpful kind of stereotyping, that leaves those Americans without the support they need. That might be a valid point, but it does also beg a question about Glock ’45’s own aesthetic.
The band’s ‘twist’ is that while it looks and sounds like the toothless hicks and ignorant racists who usually enjoy this music, they are in fact critical of the white supremacist presidency that said hicks are also assumed to ally themselves with. This is something Swedish punk act Viagra Boys manages to do brilliantly – both sending up the genre, and the politics, while also showing the tenderness and emotional diversity present among some parts of that community.
But on this showing, Glock ’45 are stuck in part one. They lean heavily into establishment Democrat iconography, of making the impoverished and desperate citizens of the American South synonymous with Republican policy and Christian nationalism. But there is no question as to how many people in the South – including ‘redneck’ country enthusiasts might oppose the MAGA project, or support the LGBT+ community. After all, even in Texas in 2024, 42% of the state’s 11 million votes were still cast against Donald Trump. And that is the kind of thing that Hukker might have pushed more on – because while I don’t doubt the band could provide a satisfactory answer, the fact they aren’t challenged to feels like a conspicuously pulled punch.
Of course, entrenched journalists in all walks of life find it hard to pick a fight with the people they have been invited to document. That is nothing new, and Hukker has far less financial or institutional backing than most – while the absence of a crew list suggests that she had to undertake the film’s excellent edit on her own; a truly Herculean effort, considering she had to piece together a coherent narrative from a whole summer of footage. Even so, if she had found the energy to ask bigger questions while the camera was rolling, it would also have helped to structure that story – and to make up for the fact that the second form of apparent friction is so underwhelming.
Smikkel is an almost mythical figure in the first half of the film. When we discuss his influence on the band’s formation, it is with a reserved reverence – and always in the past tense. New guitar and fiddle riffs are required to be “Smikkel-like”. Later, when the subject comes up that life on the road with other living, breathing, messy and loud people, what happened “with Smikkel” is presented as an unspoken example of the toll it can take. And that leaves us wondering, oh god, what happened to Smikkel? The assumption in the combustible world of live music, and the competing egos of a band, is that either he left over a blow-up over music direction, or worse, he is no longer physically capable of participating.
When it turns out something far less final is the reason for Smikkel’s absence, and a far more reasonable cause is revealed, we feel this absolute lack of pushback all the more. Meanwhile, the true identities of the bandmembers is again buried beneath performance – because without any kind of formative struggle, there is no way to measure the real humans behind it all. The ‘accents’ might drop when the gang are off stage, but who they are, and why they do the things they do, remain a mystery.
In some aspects, Glock ’45: The Movie could afford to delve a little deeper, push a little bit further. Flustering its subjects just a little, to scratch beneath the façade would have taken this from good to great, as a portrait of these artists. Even so, through the charting of the creation of a song in the midst of the band, Hukker makes us feel part of things – and reconnects us with that part of ourselves that loves the act of creation – not just serving up the creators, or something created as a product to passively consume. And as a manifesto in support of following your dream, however bafflingly out of place it might seem, and highlighting the importance of collaboration and friendship to realise those goals, this is a likeable, tightly edited short – which will likely leave its audiences keen to become part of the family at Glock’s next live show.