Primarily a showcase for various specific punk rock bands of the time such as The Roosters, The Rockers, and The Stalin, the film is also purely demonstrative of the culture and attitude of the punk rock community of Japan in the mid-to-late 1970s and the early 1980s, and is considered a defining film of that subculture.

In the first thread, residents in a dystopian future attempt to rebel against the construction of a nuclear power plant in their part of Tokyo.

Ishii wanted to feature musicians from all three of the major punk hubs in Japan: The Stalin were from Tokyo, Machizo Machida was from Kansai, and The Roosters and the Rockers were from Kyushu.

It has been called one of the "starting points in contemporary Japanese cinema", along with Ishii's own Shuffle, Panic in High School, and Crazy Thunder Road.

Todd Brown of ScreenAnarchy argued that "while Burst City is clearly a watershed film, it stands up better as a cultural document than as a film, per se,"[2] but Simon Abrams wrote on RogerEbert.com that the director "perfectly captures his subjects' prickly, defiant attitude, making Burst City a defiant (and still-relevant) reaction to nuclear proliferation.