The life of a mid-to-lower-tier band on tour ain’t for the faint of heart. Sleepless nights spent driving the red-eye shift, siphoning gas to save a little pocket change, going days without showering, accidentally driving into the occasional cornfield — it takes a dedicated soul to see it through. But even months spent crashing on floors and couches in kindred souls’ apartments can’t measure up to the torrent of hell that befalls the Ain’t Rights, the tightly-knit punk outfit at the heart of Jeremy Saulnier’s supremely brutal new feature Green Room. Being hungry and smelly is unfun; accidentally witnessing a murder, getting locked in a small room by neo-Nazis hopped up on crank, and viciously picked off one by one is another matter entirely.

The newest trailer surfaced online this morning, and places a special focus on the skinhead-honcho played by the beloved Patrick Stewart. As the pull-quote in the trailer indicates, this is Stewart as we’ve never seen him before: he conducts himself with a terrifying reserve that barely contains merciless cruelty, violently upending the persona he’s established with such heroes as Jean-Luc Picard and Professor Charles Xavier. He doesn’t have to raise his voice to inspire chilling fear in his charges or the audience. They know what he’s capable of, and even though we don’t, imagining is almost worse.

What good fortune that the film around him is also a taut, unsparing thriller with inventive plotting and unforgettable action sequences. (Thus far, literally — I was lucky enough to catch a screening at the Toronto International Film Festival in September, and still flash back to a certain image of a mutilate appendage every few days.) The film premieres in a wide release on April 15, and the next month can’t pass soon enough. Now, more than ever, punk’s not dead.

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