Stars:
****
Rating: Not Rated, but
could be PG-13 for language and adult situations
Run
Time: 2
hours, 20 minutes
One of the
most intriguing films of the year features classic rockers getting in touch with
their inner heavy metalists.
Metal band
Metallica, on the cutting edge of the scene for twenty years with an astounding
90 million albums sold, is crashing and burning in true rock-and-roll style. Bassist
Jason Newsted has split the band, anxious to pursue his work with pet
underground project Echo Brain. Sprinkling salt on the wounds is Metallica
frontman James Hetfield, who’s coming face to face with his alcoholism and exorcising
his demons from the precipice of his own personal hell.
On the
brink of collapse, the band-members hire performance enhancement coach Phil
Towle to cope with this skittish transitional period. All this as the band
enters the studio to record their first record in seven years (St. Anger), an album that should put
the middle-aged icons back on track with fans who abandoned them when they took
a hard line against Napster.
The players
are a mixed bag of luminaries – outspoken leader and drummer Lars Ulrich (“Don’t
talk it, walk it”), sensitive New Age guitarist Kirk Hammett, and tortured soul
Hetfield, one of the band’s original founders.
The new
album is the least of their worries. Concealed
jealousies and indignation, years of groupie lifestyle and substance abuse, and
the omnipresent spin doctor (“tension produces results”) threaten to destroy
one of rock’s pre-eminent head-banging legends.
At a spendy
$40,000 a month to be at Metallica’s beck and call, Phil’s ego expands along
with the band’s burgeoning hornet’s nest of issues. As the boys hurl precious psycho-babble at
Phil and at each other (“It’s not about what he says, it’s about how I feel”),
the group burrows under its psychological warts and drifts further away from
its stalled project, a creative process now some seven hundred days into
production.
The goal is
to keep an aggressive edge to the music without the negative energy. And keep
the band together. Filmmakers Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky trail the boys
for two and a half years for a by-the-numbers, behind-the-music shoot, getting
a lot more than they bargained for and landing a gold mine of a documentary.
Humorous,
painful, and rawly satisfying, Metallica
is a voyeuristic rock-and-roll fantasy.