If someone says ‘emo music’ to you, you might cringe. In fact, you probably do. You probably think guyliner, dyed black hair, melodramatic song titles (44. Calibre Love Letter, anyone?) and blood-spattered album covers. Whilst this might represent an accurate if harsh image of the emo scene in the early Noughties, nowadays there’s a large swathe of the punk community who would take issue with it. Emo has changed.

In recent years, there’s been a lot written about the emo ‘revival’, the way in which, ostensibly, emo in the vein that people in their thirties will remember the genre developing through the Nineties. It’s not My Chemical Romance; it could be Weezer. Emo never really went anywhere – rather, it’s returned to its roots in a twinkly, open-tuning riff-based guitar sound with confessional lyrics about high school and small town Middle America. Imagine pop-punk mixed with post-rock instrumentals and you’re not far off the modern emo sound.

For those understandably less familiar with older bands who really struck out and made emo its own genre as it branched off from hardcore about twenty-five years ago (the name of the genre itself is said to be a shortening of ‘emotional hardcore’), bands like American Football, Mineral and Texas is the Reason are a good place to begin. Old emo sounds like the uncertain younger brother of grunge, and was arguably overshadowed by it. Kids from the Midwest would write songs in their parents’ garages, isolated from the world in a way Seattle grunge wasn’t, but with dreams of escaping suburbia nonetheless. The dynamic made for an interesting, often heartbreaking vibe.

It was all put on hold. The likes of Fall Out Boy, Taking Back Sunday and Alexisonfire gave emo a whole new aesthetic and fanbase in the early years of the last decade. Gone were thick-rimmed black glasses and lumberjack shirts; in their place, skinny jeans, dip-dyed fringes and snakebite piercings took over. These bands, despite making excellent music, marked a departure in style from what came before. They were still the voice of a generation of outsiders, but these were outsiders who wanted to be noticed, who wanted the jocks and the cool kids to see them and to reject them, rather than a generation who were overlooked, quiet and introspective.

And then, for some reason, came the revival. New bands and songwriters from Philly and the Midwest toured together. American Football reformed. Heralded by artists like Modern Baseball, high school reject vibes returned and the poetic loser desperate to escape the small town was once again celebrated.

The question of why this resurgence in popularity happened is still unanswered. Perhaps it’s the genuine truthfulness of the songs that appeals after a decade of gutsy but overstated drama. Modern Baseball’s Hours Outside in the Snow ends with a message, fictitious or honest, to a girl called Erin. It seems melodramatic, the kind of tactic employed by a band who want their fans to see how sensitive and tormented they are, but a quick Google reveals Erin is a real girl, and in fact her answerphone is included in the closing, resignatory chords of the song. Gimmick or not, the bravery to write about someone real, about something real, is admirable. Other lyrics speak of high school rejection (‘I told you I loved you/Just outside your mom’s place/You laughed then you felt bad/As we sat there red-faced’ and ‘Is he here? Are you making out?/Shut up, make out, do something already/I’m waiting’) and conjure images of running through small-town America to ask a girl to prom, inhabiting that murky stage between teenage years and adulthood.

Having seen the band live in Kingston, the loyalty of their fan base is testament to the community that emo has become. Indeed, many of these bands are just kids playing out of their suburban or rural U.S. garages, liberated to experience and release music as the kids of the 90s never were by the Internet. Most can’t sing, but it makes it all the more charming, and more importantly, honest.

If Modern Baseball captures the iconic lyrical quality of 90s emo and the high priests of the genre American Football, then Prawn and others get the riffs right. Emo is as instrumental as is it is confessional. UK bands are prominent too, namely Nai Harvest and Moose Blood, both harnessing the raw energy of young men with guitars, left with nothing to do but write about their feelings. Small labels in the U.S. such as Count Your Lucky Stars, Run For Cover Records and No Sleep Records put out splits between bands, often on vinyl and cassette tape – just one more in a vast array of indicators that emo has not yet finished its love affair with the past.

All this serves to demonstrate one thing: it’s evolution, not revolution for emo music, and it deserves a fighting chance to win you over.

★★★★☆

Four Stars

In 2005, Reese Witherspoon won an Oscar for her portrayal of June Carter in the Johnny Cash biopic Walk the Line. In Wild, she walks a line once again. A very long line. A very, very long line. A line over a thousand miles long, to be more precise. Based on Cheryl Strayed’s 2012 memoir, the film tracks Witherspoon – as Cheryl – taking on the infamously arduous yet breathtakingly rewarding Pacific Crest Trail, which stretches from the Mexican to the Canadian border of the USA. What’s she walking towards? What’s she walking away from? Why is she walking at all? We have to walk alongside her to find out.

In the opening in medias res scene, squeamish audience members were forced to turn their heads as Cheryl, bruised and battered, yanked off her bleeding big toenail. Casting her fate (and her shoes) to the wind, she beats on – determined, resolute, indomitable. Through flashbacks, we learn how Cheryl came to be so alone in her life, and how she found herself so alone in the middle of the wild. A downward spiral of infidelity and drug use on her part led to a painful divorce, but Cheryl is adamant that she can forgive herself. It’s a raw, vulnerable and exposed performance. At one point she is mistaken for a homeless drifter by a passing “Hobo Times” reporter. When she struggles to answer his questions about where she is living and what her job is, it dawns upon Cheryl – and us – that she really has nothing to lose.

As her ex-husband tells Cheryl that he is “sorry [she has] to walk a thousand miles just to…” he cannot help but trail off, unable to finish his sentence. That’s not too dissimilar from how the audience feel at times. We’re not exactly sure Cheryl knows why she has undertaken this tumultuous journey, but – through Witherspoon – we are able to accept that this is something she simply knows that she has to do. She claims at one point, her eyes clasped on the sublimity of her surroundings, “I’m lonelier in my real life than I am out here”. It’s perhaps the first time that Cheryl has truly been honest with us.

This is, without a doubt, a solo adventure. The only other role of significant screen time is mastered by Laura Dern as Cheryl’s mother Bobbi. It’s odd that Dern, only nine years Witherspoon’s senior, is cast as her mother, but then again Cheryl and Bobbi’s relationship is a bond more like sisterhood than mother and daughter. They even enroll at college at the same time (Cheryl having to awkwardly pass her giddy mother in the school corridors). Dern, playing a single mother who escaped the clutches of an abusive husband, supplies an impenetrable optimism in her fleeting but impressionable performance. Perhaps this is where Cheryl gets her determination from. Bobbi’s death hits Cheryl hard, and one of the most sensitive scenes sees Cheryl fall to her knees in the middle of the wild, cast up her head to the skies, and tell her mother directly that she misses her.

With each step Cheryl learns something new about herself. Out in the vast open and against the grandeur of nature, she realises her own insignificance in the world, and moreover the insignificance of mankind. Cheryl finds a kindred spirit in a wandering fox (a metaphor?) and through howling with wolves in the dead of night. Transience is a prevailing theme. The only evidence of Cheryl’s journey that she leaves behind are small notes in the form of laconic phrases and epigrams – comforting words of advice to any others who may seek the same quest of self-enlightenment that she has.

Some of the best moments of the film are when it allows us to stop and admire the beauty of the natural world (a credit to Yves Bélanger’s lens flare cinematography). It should be noted, however, that it’s not a picture especially flattering to men. We are made to feel apprehensive of every single male Cheryl encounters along the way just as uneasily as she does, and often – unfortunately – they are just as predatory and threatening as she fears. Wild is a loud shout for feminism – Cheryl epitomising a strong-willed and independent woman determined to take life into her own hands – and feet.