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Lifestyle The New Sober Boom Getting Hooked on Quitting

Getting Hooked on Quitting

Education Liberal Arts Cuts Are Dangerous Is College Necessary?

Liberal Arts Cuts Are Dangerous

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Finance Dying Parents Costing Millennials Dear Gen Z Investing In Le Creuset

Dying Parents Costing Millennials Dear

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Crypto Investing SEC vs Celebrity Crypto Promoters ‘Dark’ Personalities Drawn to BTC

Investing SEC vs Celebrity Crypto Promoters ‘Dark’ Personalities Drawn to BTC

SEC vs Celebrity Crypto Promoters

‘Dark’ Personalities Drawn to BTC

Reviews Lifestyle The New Sober Boom Getting Hooked on Quitting Education Liberal Arts Cuts Are Dangerous Is College Necessary? Finance Dying Parents Costing Millennials Dear Gen Z Investing In Le Creuset Crypto Investing SEC vs Celebrity Crypto Promoters ‘Dark’ Personalities Drawn to BTC

Lifestyle The New Sober Boom Getting Hooked on Quitting

Getting Hooked on Quitting

Education Liberal Arts Cuts Are Dangerous Is College Necessary?

Liberal Arts Cuts Are Dangerous

Is College Necessary?

Finance Dying Parents Costing Millennials Dear Gen Z Investing In Le Creuset

Dying Parents Costing Millennials Dear

Gen Z Investing In Le Creuset

Crypto Investing SEC vs Celebrity Crypto Promoters ‘Dark’ Personalities Drawn to BTC

Investing SEC vs Celebrity Crypto Promoters ‘Dark’ Personalities Drawn to BTC

SEC vs Celebrity Crypto Promoters

‘Dark’ Personalities Drawn to BTC

“Pretty Ugly” resurrects the Lunachicks as Punk Rock’s most underrated revolutionaries

Ilya Chaiken’s documentary traces the band's East Village rise and feminist punk legacy

Published April 28, 2026 12:00PM (EDT)

The opening of the new documentary about the loud, hilarious and irreverent ’90’s band the Lunachicks features the same kinds of devices anyone who’s ever watched a music documentary will be familiar with: a shot of an audience, with accompanying excited murmurings, and then, voices making fearless assertions: “Everything was a challenge that needed to be conquered,” “We’re gonna, like, melt people’s fu*king faces off because they expected us to suck,” “We were literally out there with people throwing pint glasses at our heads and pulling their dicks out at us,” and then: “But we have a superpower when we’re together. And it was us against everybody. It was like us against the world.”

You see the back of a leather jacket — if you’re a fan, you know it’s Theo Kogan, the band’s formidable lead singer — and you can see her shoulders square as though she’s girding herself for battle. And then there she is, bounding onstage at New York City’s Webster Hall in 2021, for a pair of reunion concerts that were scheduled and then rescheduled multiple times because of COVID-19, raising her arms in triumph.

This is “Pretty Ugly: the Story of the Lunachicks.”

(Giant Pictures) Theo Kogan of the Lunachicks, backstage at Webster Hall

“Pretty Ugly” documents the story of the Lunachicks, from before they were a band, taking the viewer through their very early days: their childhood friendships, their formation, the triumph of early shows and the environment that created them. It also captures the band members in current times, as the core group (with a fair amount of reluctance) agrees to play some reunion shows. Both the film and the story are sad and brilliant and hilarious and infuriating, and the documentary moves with love and understanding and a deliberate and specific rhythm. This is not something you put on in the background while you scroll social media on your phone; it moves briskly, and you will find yourself getting attached to the band members and their lives, work and art.

The film lets you feel — not just see, or watch, nothing here is passive — the band and its vibe and its ethos, but you also feel the director’s eye and her vision for the story she wanted to tell, and tell correctly. It is about friendship and creativity and New York City, specifically the East Village when you didn’t walk past First Avenue alone, on the edge of gentrification and the 1988 Tompkins Square Park riots. It is about what happened when a bunch of friends decided to start a band even though no one could really play an instrument. It is about punk rock and the inevitable commercialization of it. And it is about life as a woman and as an artist in America.

The Lunachicks came of age in NYC’s East Village in the mid-’80s, with Kogan, guitarist Gina Volpe and bassist Sydney “Squid” Silver........

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