Smash Your Head on the Punk Rock, the first novel from Montreal filmmaker Matt Bissonnette (Looking for Leonard, Who Loves the Sun), is all about punk music, drugs, and the politically tumultuous Montreal of the 1970s and ’80s – a potentially powerful mix for a story that tracks five anglo friends as they move from adolescence to adulthood. Their journey leads them through several coming-of-age clichés: emergent sexuality, music worship, parental concerns, drug trips as self-discovery, and friendships torn asunder by religion, intellect, sex, and class differences.

Though each of the four boys (Bug, Stephen, Ryan, and Henry) and one girl (Frances) get several turns in the spotlight, over a series of clipped chapters as brief and immediate as pop songs, Bissonnette has difficulty avoiding the predictability of his well-trod narrative. The acid-trips-on-rooftops scenes have a distinct afterschool special quality to them, while the sexual fantasies depicted in the book land closer to porn than characterization. The discovery of punk music, meant to be a watershed moment for the group, is depicted in overripe prose: “Every secret hope you never told a soul is coming true.… believing for some two minutes and thirty-seven seconds that some worms, like you, and yes, maybe even your friends, make it to butterflies.”

Even when the author does attempt to shed new light on old tales, it comes off as jarring and unsupported. When one of the boys confronts the priest who sexually abused him as a teen – a situation long since reduced to cliché by overuse in books and movies – the scene rapidly becomes ludicrous instead of cathartic.

The book’s narrative doggedly shifts from one character to the next, showing each in ironically similar circumstances; the trick becomes rote and tires quickly. Pop culture references have a similar quality, feeling forced as they are offered in place of real description. This applies to chapter titles (“Are You There God, It’s Me, Frances”), personal exchanges (“Gidget breaks the St. Elmo’s Fire moment”), interior reflection (“that starts to annoy for obvious Richie Rich reasons”), and sensory description (“his favourite red windbreaker, much like J. Dean’s in Rebel Without a Cause”).

Despite the many amateurish techniques, uneven voices, narrative hiccups, and green prose, the text does possess a certain lo-fi, rough-and-tumble charm. All the same, Smash Your Head on the Punk Rock is a missed opportunity to offer a unique perspective on coming-of-age conventions.