Review: Suburban Fury
April 27, 2026, I went to the Hollywood Theater on a Monday with Moe, and we saw the Suburban Fury documentary.
WOW! Robinson Devor did an incredible job! The doc is about Sara Jane Sara Jane Moore (who died Sept, 2025 at 95 years old) who is known to us as the second woman who failed to assassinate then president President Gerald Ford.
So, she’s a policial radical in her statements after the assassination attempt. Then we learn she was also an FBI informant, and began working for them while Patty Hearst was kidnapped/joined the Symbionese Liberation Army (the same group that the Ramones told us about in “Jackie is a Punk” when Jackie and Judy went to Frisco to join the SLA) and Moore began to work as a liaison between the Hearst family and the community food distribution program. She was trusted maybe? At first? by the political groups, but there was classic FBI fuckery that she both participated in and claims to have been against in her interviews. Devor keeps peeling back layers of the story so that her history builds upon itself in a nonlinear and fascinating way. She’s the most unreliable narrator I’ve seen in a long time, and claims that it’s easy to seperate your personality - it’s like being one person at home, and one at work. Is her quote “There comes a point where the only way to make a statement is to pick up a gun,” lifted from a press conference that Popeye Jackson gave outside of San Quentin? And did they get together because they were both informants? What was her deal?
More bits of great documentary film making: her children were protected. We only hear about 1 from her, but her mom let’s us know she’d had 3 before she left West Virginia. We never learn their names, which was a respectful and classy move. San Francisco looks so good! My first memories of the city are from about that time, my grandparents had an apartment across the street from the Mint. I loved the move of interviewing her in the station wagon, and then using a drone to put her in context - across from the FBI headquarters, for instance.
It was a one-night-only showing, and I’m so glad I made it. Also seeing it the day after one of trumps failed assassination attempts was interesting context. I’m still thinking about all of it, and I hope to see it again.
