Hi, Mom!

Hi, Mom! (1970) — watch online Brian De Palma's anarchic early comedy with a young Robert De Niro in the lead, two years before The Godfather made him a household name. A raw, guerrilla-style satire shot on the streets of New York City.

Jon Rubin is a Vietnam vet who drifts back to a grimy Greenwich Village apartment and decides to make his living filming the neighbors across the street without their knowledge. The scheme collapses. He then falls in with a radical street theater collective whose provocations keep escalating well past the point of art, ending in something closer to urban warfare. Allen Garfield and Charles Durning appear in supporting roles that genre fans still cite decades later.

De Palma made the film with borrowed money and a handheld camera, and it shows — in the best way. The comedy is aggressively countercultural, skewering both the bourgeois comfort it mocks and the radical posturing it depicts. Stream Hi, Mom! (1970) online on iFILM.