FILM OF THE WEEK: Once We Were Punks - Reviewed by Roe McDermott

Once We Were Punks begins with what seems like a fairly familiar music documentary set-up: a middle-aged band reuniting for a gig after years apart. But Frank Shouldice’s film quickly becomes something richer and more emotionally complex than a straightforward nostalgia exercise. Centred on Sons of Southern Ulster - the Cavan post-punk group led by vocalist and lyricist Justin Kelly alongside guitarist David Meagher, drummer Noel Larkin and bassist Paddy Glackin - the documentary uses the reunion to explore ageing, emigration, illness, masculinity, memory and the particular emotional landscape of rural Irish life.

The band emerged from Bailieborough, Co. Cavan, first as teenage punk outfit The Panic Merchants before evolving into Sons of Southern Ulster, a name taken from what Justin describes as “the three counties the Brits didn’t want and Ireland didn’t give a shit about” - Cavan, Monaghan and Donegal. That sense of marginality runs through both the music and the documentary itself. Their songs are deeply rooted in place, filled with local characters, pubs, frustrations and emotional dead ends, but they never feel parochial. Instead, the specificity gives the music its force. Justin recalls his father once advising him to write about the people and places he actually knew - advice he initially dismissed before eventually building an entire songwriting philosophy around it.

That father was Captain James Kelly, the intelligence officer charged during the 1970 Arms Crisis with conspiring to illegally import weapons for Northern Republicans before ultimately being acquitted. The scandal devastated the family, permanently damaging Kelly’s reputation and the family’s relationship with Ireland. Justin eventually relocated to America. The film approaches this history with remarkable care, allowing its emotional consequences to emerge without reducing Justin’s work to autobiography. Still, the influence is unmistakable. There is anger running through Justin’s songs and lyrics, a desire to tell the truth and for that truth to be witnessed.

What gives Once We Were Punks its emotional depth, however, is the way it frames the reunion against the realities of middle age. By the time the band regroups for a 2022 Whelan’s show, life has scattered them across continents. Justin lives in America, Paddy in Australia. They are no longer young men performing fantasies of escape from small-town Ireland; they are older now, shaped by grief, illness, sexuality, migration and dislocation. Paddy speaks about growing up gay in a homophobic Ireland and needing to leave in order to build a happy life with his husband abroad. David now finds himself playing alongside his own son, awkwardly but affectionately navigating the strange overlap between parenthood and artistic peer-hood.

Most affecting of all is the documentary’s gradual focus on Noel Larkin’s cancer diagnosis. Introduced almost in passing, it slowly becomes the emotional centre of the film. Noel himself treats it with an understated practicality, but as his condition worsens, and as his wife explains that they no longer think too far into the future and instead focus on getting through one day at a time, the reunion takes on an entirely different weight. Songs about youth, boredom, regret and survival land differently. A lyric like “So here I am, middle-aged and lined, longing for all that used to bore me” stops sounding wry and starts sounding devastating.

What Once We Were Punks captures so beautifully is the particular shock of reaching an age you once could not imagine yourself inhabiting. Punk, after all, is so often associated with youth, anger and opposition to adulthood itself. But the documentary understands that ageing does not erase those earlier selves. These men are still shaped by the teenagers they once were, still carrying old hurts, old ambitions and old versions of Ireland inside them. The result is a film less interested in coolness or revival than in endurance - in the fragile, moving fact of people surviving long enough to look back at who they were with humour, embarrassment, grief and gratitude all tangled together.

Directed by Frank Shouldice. Featuring Justin Kelly, David Meagher, Noel Larkin, Paddy Glackin. 96 mins.

• In cinemas May 15. Watch the trailer below: