(S)KIDS: Rare Americans’ Punk Rock Opera on the Disaffected Youth
Copyright: © 2024 Rare Americans
By: Eero Schauman, Skyline Contributor
ALPINE – On April 5th, 2025, the Canadian punk band Rare Americans in conjunction with Solis Animation released their film (S)KIDS for free on YouTube.
Set in the City of Champions in 1993, modeled after the Canadian Midwest, the film is the perfect setting to portray a group of teens navigating drug use, homophobia, abuse, and a plethora of other issues that have been overwhelming youth for decades.
Rare Americans is narrated by the character of Scotty, the new kid in school, as he is foisted into the social structures of Saint Elmo’s, a Catholic high school. The film follows him and his disaffected friends who live on the margins of humanity and explores their feelings as “skid marks on society.” The term “skids” is typically used to refer to an outcast, though more generally used to describe metalheads, punks, and other alternative cultures.
Scotty and his friends are thrust into multiple conflicts throughout the movie. First, Scotty struggles with his love interest, the valedictorian Molly and her drug problems as she copes with the loss of her mother. The group also struggles against the small-time drug kingpin of their school, Sammy and his enforcer Corey, who has a buried past with the skids.
Set nine years before the Boston Globe’s exposé on sexual abuse within the Catholic Church and amidst the closure of Canada’s infamous residential schools, places designed to assimilate indigenous peoples with a long history of abuse and death, the Rare Americans is able to intertwine a third storyline of the principal of Saint Elmo’s being a creep with a dark and evil past.
The skids experience righteous fury, depression, suicide attempts, drug, sexual, and familial abuse. They face these twists and turn in the struggle to find a way out of their confusing and dismal hell, all the while trying to pursue their passions.
With uniquely stylized animation, feeling like the patchwork “Zines” most popular from the 1970’s-1990’s, the film is about found family, and throughout the musical masterpiece created by Rare Americans, we see this group of teens trauma bond, support each other, defending and picking each other up off the ground. The film shows that community is what helps peoplethrough the hard times, that there’s hope for those willing to fight for it, and that everyone struggles, the ones who seem fine and those cast out from the norm alike.
The movie brings tears, but also a sense of being seen for so many who have been or are in these situations. In the tragic, dark world of Rare American, we learn why people need each otherand how one can find that they might not be as alone as they feel. Along with this film, Rare Americans’ other works are available to watch on YouTube and on most other music streaming platforms.