Growing up in Montreal, Simple Plan's Pierre Bouvier and Chuck Comeau were drawn together by their mutual love of punk rock music.

For Bouvier, it all started when he discovered skateboarding at eight years old. He and his family would regularly visit his snowbird grandparents in Daytona Beach, Fla., where there were plenty of skate parks and shops.

"I would idolize that style, that counterculture," Bouvier says in an interview with Q's Tom Power alongside Comeau. "That was my whole identity…. It felt badass. I listen to stuff that's fast and aggressive, and I grind off sidewalks and I'm rolling on my skateboard, and it's loud, and it's who I am."

But even though Bouvier and Comeau came up in the punk rock scene — and their worldwide success was built on a DIY punk rock ethos — Simple Plan endured a lot of hate in the early 2000s for sounding too pop or mainstream.

For example, Bouvier says I'd Do Anything (the second single off Simple Plan's debut album, No Pads, No Helmets...Just Balls) is "a straight-up love song" that's actually quite tender. Inspired by Blink-182's 1999 album Enema of the State, Bouvier wanted to try writing a "refreshing new take on pop-punk" that felt positive.

"Back in those days … you were either punk or you were not," he explains. "We came up from the punk rock community, but our music was way more poppy…. People felt they had to slam us for that and it was super hurtful, but luckily we were building an amazing fan base one fan at a time, and it was growing."

Comeau adds that rather than creating tension in the band, the hate actually brought them closer together.

"It became a bit of an us against the world," he says. "I think it's always good for a band to have a common enemy. It bonds you together…. If nobody cares about your band — whether it's positive or negative — that's bad. If people love you or hate you, it's because you're creating this reaction. It's polarized, and that's a good sign. It means that you're actually moving the needle."

But the negativity Simple Plan faced wasn't just criticism of their music. A new documentary, Simple Plan: The Kids in the Crowd, shows how people would throw bottles at them on stage, threaten them or try to start fights with them.

"Still, to this day, there's a little bit of PTSD," Comeau says. "People would come up at the time and they would be like, 'Hey, you're in Simple Plan.' And I had no idea what was coming next. Was it like, 'I love you guys!' Or like, 'You guys are terrible.'"

On the positive side, a lot of people, particularly young people, have really connected to Simple Plan's music over the years. One fan told Bouvier and Comeau that their song Welcome to My Life actually stopped them from taking their own life when they were going through a dark time. The band still receives emotional messages like that to this day.

"That's why we call the movie The Kids in the Crowd, because we are these kids in the crowd that had that profound love for music, and reaction to music, and now, somehow, we became this band that gets to write these songs that have that same similar impact for a new generation of people," Comeau says. "I mean, that was what we wanted all along: to be that band."

Simple Plan: The Kids in the Crowd is streaming now on Amazon Prime.

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Interview with Simple Plan produced by Vanessa Nigro.