PUNK’S GOT CANCER
By:
April 15, 2026
One in a series of occasional detours from Adam McGovern’s irregularly scheduled column OFF-TOPIC.
Pasted together like a wall of gig flyers forming a gorgeous mosaic only chance and individuality could compose, Heavy Healing is a moving, never stopping choral oral history of obstinate survival. Interviewing a wide community of punk and metal artists, superfans and music-industry believers who have faced debilitating psychological and life-threatening physical illness, it’s a loud and clarifying testament to how the resistant ethos and outsider base of these genres feeds courage and common purpose, among the afflicted and those who give a fuck.
The catharsis of aggressive music’s blaring sound and safely dramatized conflict is confirmed by a PhD psychologist at one point, so everyone has a note from their doctor to rock. It’s totally punk and totally metal to hear difficult subjects real-talked about with zero sentimentality and maximum irreverence; this music was meant to shine a light and turn up the volume on what established society wants hidden and silent, so gory details of rare diseases and honesty about self-harm with substances and unapologetic openness about stigmatized mental conditions and unafraid advice about the help you can seek (cancer-screenings, recovery programs) are all on the table.
We hear how music saved the lives of square-peg, outcast kids to begin with, and how hearing it and/or making it helps keep them alive past sickness and into old age. The absence of easy answers and persistence of grounded perspective, sincere sense of limits, and relentless defiant humor are the best kind of crowd-wisdom, and the range of speakers is better than most clinical trials in gender, race and age (black, brown, white and South Asian, male and female, from middle-aged rock veterans to a 9-year-old Rage and Maiden fan with Type 1 diabetes). Everybody gets a say, from those trusting in conventional medicine to those reporting cures from the farthest alternatives; we’re here to listen and use our own minds.
The lesson of garage rock and punk was always “you could do what we do”; the message of this movie is “you can get through what we did”. No one does it alone, and thankfulness for other people is a frequently expressed theme, while the blessing of a still-functioning healthcare system is a consistently implied one; the social-strata politics of much metal and most punk is being lived out by its makers and adherents here. I had plenty flashbacks while watching this, to my own recurrent depression and to my late wife’s reprieve due to the kind of experimental treatments that are now defunded and her lifeline from the government-subsidized coverage they keep trying to cut. Heavy Healing is a vital record for times when caring is rebellion and community is our only cure.
Trailer: here
Insta: @Heavy_Healing_Film
MORE POSTS by ADAM McGOVERN: OFF-TOPIC (2019–2025 monthly) | textshow (2018 quarterly) | PANEL ZERO (comics-related Q&As, 2018 monthly) | THIS: (2016–2017 weekly) | PEOPLE YOU MEET IN HELL, a 5-part series about characters in McGovern’s and Paolo Leandri’s comic Nightworld | Two IDORU JONES comics by McGovern and Paolo Leandri | BOWIEOLOGY: Celebrating 50 years of Bowie | ODD ABSURDUM: How Felix invented the 21st century self | KOJAK YOUR ENTHUSIASM: FAWLTY TOWERS | KICK YOUR ENTHUSIASM: JACKIE McGEE | NERD YOUR ENTHUSIASM: JOAN SEMMEL | SWERVE YOUR ENTHUSIASM: INTRO and THE LEON SUITES | FIVE-O YOUR ENTHUSIASM: JULIA | FERB YOUR ENTHUSIASM: KIMBA THE WHITE LION | CARBONA YOUR ENTHUSIASM: WASHINGTON BULLETS | KLAATU YOU: SILENT RUNNING | CONVOY YOUR ENTHUSIASM: QUINTET | TUBE YOUR ENTHUSIASM: HIGHWAY PATROL | #SQUADGOALS: KAMANDI’S FAMILY | QUIRK YOUR ENTHUSIASM: LUCKY NUMBER | CROM YOUR ENTHUSIASM: JIREL OF JOIRY | KERN YOUR ENTHUSIASM: Data 70 | HERC YOUR ENTHUSIASM: “Freedom” | KIRK YOUR ENTHUSIASM: Captain Camelot | KIRB YOUR ENTHUSIASM: Full Fathom Five | A 5-part series on Jack Kirby’s Fourth World mythos | Reviews of Annie Nocenti’s comics Katana, Catwoman, Klarion, and Green Arrow | The curated series FANCHILD | To see all of Adam’s posts, including HiLo Hero items on Lilli Carré, Judy Garland, Wally Wood, and others: CLICK HERE