Hot Docs 2023: I'm Just Here for the Riot

When the Vancouver Canucks lost Game 7 of the Stanley Cup Finals on June 15, 2011, the city lost it. The excitement had brought the city together and teased the potential return of Lord Stanley to Canada, but then the Canucks lost on home ice and the pent-up excitement turned to anger. The fans got pissed, in both senses of the word. Tossing garbage led to tipping cars. Smashing garbage bins led to smashing mall windows. The party turned into a full-on riot, one that the city of Vancouver, and Canadian hockey fans in general, are still trying to live down. Kathleen Jayme and Asia Youngman’s amazingly-named doc, I’m Just Here for the Riot (named after a joke shirt from a famous photo of the riot), revisits this event that continues to embarrass Vancouver and hockey fans to this day. It sets up not only the atmosphere in the city that led to the riots, but also the social consequences suffered by those individuals stupid enough to get caught up in it.

As an ESPN 30 for 30 documentary, I’m Just Here for the Riot aces the tried-and-true sports documentary conventions. There are interviews with key individuals who participated in the event, as well as athletes, broadcasters, and social commentators. There’s high-quality archival sports footage, propulsive music, moody framing, and wide establishing shots of cities. There’s also the tight structure, which teases something momentous, and then goes back to the beginning to carefully build towards the inciting event, mining the tension. Every good 30 for 30 documentary has that moment where “everything changed” and here, it’s the moment in the Vancouver streets following the loss. The shock turns to anger. Fans start fighting. There’s a pervasive atmosphere of resentment and fear: people know something is going down. And then the cloud bursts. This story was made to be a 30 for 30 doc. It’s entertaining, it’s ludicrous, and it goes down smooth.

It’s also surface level. Aside from a handful of 30 for 30 docs, such as the astounding O.J.: Made in America, which breaks all the conventions to go deep on O.J. Simpson and his infamous murder trial, most 30 for 30 docs touch on social issues but never deep-dive or lean into the contradictions of their subject matter. They use sports as a lens to examine the broader culture, but they are rarely rigorous, which isn’t too much of a problem. They’re entertainment, first and foremost. So, let’s be clear: I’m Just Here for the Riot is a fun watch. It knows how to reveal key information, build suspense, turn an off-the-cuff interview comment into a punchline. It’s a useful primer on recent history for a notoriously ahistorical entertainment audience. Jayme and Youngman nail the 30 for 30 approach.

But as the film moves past the riot and starts to unpack the social issues surrounding the aftermath, notably the online shaming of some key participants, it loses its impact. It spends a lot of time with key participants in the riot and indulges some of their self-pity. For instance, a key rioter, who was famously photographed wielding a hockey stick in front of a smashed-out store window, is interviewed anonymously, despite his identity and likeness being public knowledge. Another character compares online hate comments as akin to the riot itself, which constituted millions of dollars of material damage that trashed Vancouver’s downtown core. There’s some pushback from other interview subjects, but as a whole, I’m Just Here for the Riot is remarkably sympathetic to the rioters, withholding more stern condemnation for the online crowds that mistook their own rage as justice.

It’s fitting, then, that podcaster and author Jon Ronson, who wrote So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, is a key interviewee. Ronson is gifted at examining how online behaviour loses all the nuance and contradictions that exist in real human interactions, leading people to mistake their pettiness as righteousness. But there is a world of difference between some of the individuals Ronson profiles in his work and the Vancouver protesters in this film. For instance, porn star August Ames, subject of Ronson’s insightful podcast The Last Days of August, committed suicide after experiencing waves of online abuse regarding a tweet. The worst thing that happened to a subject in the film is losing some dirt bike sponsorship deals. That’s not nothing, but it’s not equal to having one’s life destroyed—or torching a downtown core because your team lost a hockey game, for that matter.

The riot was a disproportionate reaction to an upsetting, but completely immaterial, loss of a sporting contest. The online shaming was a disproportionate reaction to a visceral, material act of destruction in a city. Both were taken too far. Both were driven by rage. But they’re not equivalent. I’m Just Here for the Riot leans on this broad comparison and avoids the nuances of difference because it’s a 30 for 30 doc and 30 for 30 docs only go so deep. It’s not fatal. This is still a fun movie. But just watch it with expectations in check.

6 out of 10

I’m Just Here for the Riot (2023, Canada)

Directed by Kathleen Jayme and Asia Youngman.

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