The Simple Plan documentary is now available on Amazon Prime

[After 25 years, the time seemed right to do a documentary on Simple Plan, so when the opportunity presented itself, the band and their management jumped at the chance. Stephane Dubord has this review. – AC]

Any band that can last a quarter century deserves credit for perseverance, even moreso when it’s uninterrupted by any hiatus or breakups. And while it will likely send a chill up the spines of their fans that have been there from the start, that’s precisely the case for Montreal’s Simple Plan.

To commemorate the anniversary, the band is releasing a documentary on Amazon Prime today, Simple Plan: The Kids In The Crowd, which delves into their origin story, or pre-origin in this case. In order to tell the full Simple Plan story, you have to start with the Reset story, which saw drummer Chuck Comeau and singer Pierre Bouvier first play together. Two key themes become quite clear from those early days which still have repercussions today: personality complementarity, and at times conflict, and dogged perseverance.

Imagine getting kicked out of your own band, only to then recruit the guy who gave you the boot to join your new group? That was the key formative moment for Simple Plan, when Comeau asked former bandmate Bouvier to join him and guitarists Jeff Stinco and Sébastien Lefebvre. Getting past the egos, the personality mix found an equilibrium that has allowed the core four to remain unchanged, with that balance exemplified by the extroverted Bouvier as the yin to Comeau’s introverted yang. That said, we do get a glimpse at Comeau’s desire to break out of his shell a bit more, which was also evident on their recent stop at the All Your Friends festival, as Comeau got out from behind the kit… to go crowd surf.

Dating back to the Reset days, and evident in the early years of Simple Plan, the guys worked. And worked. Their grinding ended up paying off, but if you thought they were ‘overnight successes’ the documentary will quickly dismiss that assumption. By the time they released their debut album in 2002, the double platinum No Pads, No Helmets… Just Balls, you could draw a line back to the formation of Reset in 1993, marking almost a decade of work before they hit it big.

As Bouvier noted, “it’s a great message for anybody starting a band. You’ve got to commit. It’s not just luck. Yes, there is a part that’s luck, but you create your own luck.” That creation of luck includes Comeau calling labels and introducing himself as the band’s ‘manager’ rather than drummer in the hopes of getting more traction, and staging a ‘fake’ showcase. Well played, sirs.

Another major theme throughout the documentary is family: first with the guys’ own parents, and the support they provided them through those tough early years (including Bouvier’s dad driving their tour bus), but also later on, as they grew up to become parents themselves. Now in hindsight, Bouvier reflects on their early hit “Perfect” as a father: “I feel like the pressures of being a parent are WAY harder than the pressures of being a kid strangely enough. When you’re a kid, you don’t realize that, but when you’re a parent, you’re like ‘Oh my God, if I fuck anything up, I’m fucking YOU up.’ It’s so much harder, and it gives it a whole new perspective.”

As the band has had its ups and downs, an unexpected up was when their very first single “I’m Just A Kid” went viral on TikTok in 2020, and with their re-recording of the Scooby-Doo theme song, has introduced a whole new generation to the band. As Bouvier notes: “Kids like us because of TikTok, and their parents say ‘I used to listen to them -still do – let’s go to the show together’ which brings a whole new dynamic to the shows.”

If there is a criticism to be made of the documentary, it is that it sidesteps the controversy around their bass players. It deliberately paints the band as a quartet, and while former member David Desrosiers can be seen in some old footage, a noticeably small portion of the documentary discusses his departure amid sexual misconduct allegations. For a bassist that spent the better part of two decades in the band, his presence is virtually nonexistent in the film. That said, I can imagine the legal teams involved in the making of the film were key in framing how to navigate the situation.

In the end, fans of Simple Plan will absolutely adore this look at the retrospective look, and the closing sequence recreating early shots of the band with the guys today hammers home the point that 1) they’ve all grown up, and 2) they thankfully haven’t really changed. Even those who don’t consider themselves fans will likely appreciate just how much went into making Simple Plan household names, and one of the most successful rock bands to come out of Canada this millennium.

====Simple Plan: The Kids In The Crowd is now available to stream on Amazon Prime