Grosse Pointe Blank’s soundtrack reveals what its main character couldn’t

In Soundtracks Of Our Lives, The A.V. Club looks at the dying art of the movie companion album, those “various artists” compilations made to complement films on screen but that often end up taking on lives of their own.
In 1986, on any given week, you could likely find me at this juice bar called Medusa’s, located on Sheffield Avenue in Chicago, where DJ Bud Sweet introduced patrons to bands like Bronski Beat and Tones On Tail. Hearing a song from that era sends me back to that dance floor in a heartbeat. As far as soundtracks go, Grosse Pointe Blank is practically a time machine to my own adolescence.
John Cusack set a high bar for soundtrack selection (and music snobbery) with 2000’s High Fidelity, which has already been carefully deconstructed in this space. But he had a test run in 1997, when he took his first turn as producer on the hit-man comedy Grosse Pointe Blank, alongside his frequent collaborators—and high school friends—Steve Pink and D.V. DeVincentis. Although that trio hand-picked all of High Fidelity’s music themselves, drawing on years of scouring the bins of Chicago record stores, on Grosse Pointe Blank they had the guiding hand of music supervisor Kathy Nelson, who started out selecting songs for the 1984 punk classic Repo Man and has conjured hundreds of soundtracks since. Still, the influence of Cusack and his pals is felt throughout—particularly given how much Clash there is.
Even if you know very little about John Cusack, you probably know he’s a Clash fan. In Say Anything…, Lloyd Dobler famously wears a Clash shirt; here, a Clash poster turns up in a character’s bedroom. And of course, The Clash is all over Grosse Pointe’s soundtrack—including a score composed by Joe Strummer, whose distinctly angular guitar adds punch to the executions carried out by Cusack’s hired killer, Martin Q. Blank. For middle-class Midwestern kids like Cusack and myself, The Clash was our gateway to the broader, scarier world of English punk; in High Fidelity, Cusack’s Rob even rightly adds “Janie Jones” from the band’s eponymous first album to his list of “Top 5 Side One, Track Ones.” Among my own top five notable concerts—which includes the 1990 Public Enemy/Sonic Youth show that turned into a riot, which Cusack also attended—being at The Clash’s 1982 show at the Aragon in Chicago most impresses certain people (even though teenage me spent most of that concert terrified of the moshing crowd). The Clash was a key band for me, as it was for Cusack, and its sensibility informs the whole of Grosse Pointe Blank.
That it also reflects Cusack personally speaks to just how much of himself was invested in the film, a violent comedy that apparently had a hard time getting made, even in the wake of Pulp Fiction. Cusack’s unique charms went a long way toward selling executives and audiences on the story of a hit man who loses his taste for the job at his 10th high school reunion, where he reconnects with his ex-girlfriend, played by Minnie Driver, whose job as a local DJ gives Grosse Pointe ample opportunity to wedge in songs. But charming as he is, Cusack’s Martin is also something of an enigma, defined by his jaded stoicism. Fortunately, the soundtrack is there to provide a lot of the emotional weight. What Martin can’t tell us, the songs do.
Opening with Johnny Nash’s optimistic “I Can See Clearly Now” over minimalist black credits, the soundtrack instantly clues us in to Martin’s slow path toward enlightenment. When we first spy his hometown of Grosse Pointe, Michigan, we hear the cheerful guitar bursts of the Violent Femmes’ “Blister In The Sun.” Cusack and I were born a week apart—in the same county, even. The songs of Cusack’s and Martin’s adolescence were my own, and I didn’t know anyone who hadn’t worn out the Violent Femmes’ self-titled debut, who couldn’t identify those chords the nanosecond they heard them. As it is for Blank reentering Gross Pointe, hearing it is an instant blast of nostalgia—but as the perspective shifts to Martin’s view from inside the car, he abruptly changes it to The Clash’s brutal, bleak “Armagideon Time.” The message is obvious: To see clearly, Martin is first going to have to get through all those obstacles in his way, get back to his roots, and blow up everything else in his life.
Martin’s first stop is to visit Driver’s Debi at the radio station, where, as luck would have it, she’s hosting an all-vinyl, ’80s music weekend. Debi also has excellent musical taste, as immediately confirmed by her selection of The Specials’ “Pressure Drop” for her first Martin encounter. The song, kicking off with a gospel-reverent organ, culminates in a fervent, surprised “It is you”—the perfect musical reaction to the guy who ditched you on prom night suddenly showing up again on your doorstep.