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	Related stories The harder they come…: The new look (and sound) of Metallica. By Carly Carioli. Metallica: Welcome home. By Carly Carioli. Metal memories: Ten years of close encounters with Metallica. By Ted Drozdowski. In Metallica: Some Kind of Monster, Jason Newsted expresses his shock and dismay at hearing that the band have hired a therapist. But don’t expect to hear Lars Ulrich apologize. "The only thing in the film I disagreed with — and I told Joe [Berlinger] and Bruce [Sinofsky] this — is the way that Phil toward the end of the movie was made out to be the villain, like he was The Thing That Wouldn’t Leave. If it wasn’t for Phil Towle, there wouldn’t be a Metallica right now." Still, why therapy? "I think we realized there was one question we had to ask ourselves on the day that Jason announced he was leaving. I mean, why do you walk away from a really big, successful band? And when you sit down and go, ‘Oh, the reason he’s walking away is because of the way I treat him, the way James and I use our power, the way we suppress him creatively,’ it made us realize that we were so broken and fucked up that we didn’t know how to communicate." Then there’s the scene with Dave Mustaine. In a tête-à-tête with Ulrich, Mustaine dismisses Megadeth’s platinum success and says he’s always hated being "number two." "I was completely flabbergasted," says Ulrich. "I was so stunned that when he looked back on his life, the main thing that showed up on that radar was this second-fiddle-playing thing. This is a guy who made two or three of the best heavy-metal records in the last 20 years." Mustaine now says that he was overly emotional because the encounter took place on September 13, 2001, that Ulrich at one point during the three-hour encounter broke down in tears, and that the filmmakers took the conversation out of context, ignoring his written request to cut the footage from the film. When I suggest to Ulrich that audiences will be most astonished by the degree of insecurity displayed by the leaders of the world’s biggest metal band, he doesn’t disagree. "I remember the first house I bought. I remember going furniture shopping and thinking, ‘What are the other guys [in the band] going to think about my furniture?’ Seriously. I don’t think it was until the second decade of our band where we were comfortable enough in our own skin for our true personalities to really shine through. It was almost like the individual personalities got squashed." Neither does he dispute the observation that St. Anger, the album the band are recording in the movie, seems an abdication of songwriting. "Yeah, I don’t look it so much as songwriting. I look at it as capturing moments. It was different for us in that we didn’t really have any songs when we were recording: we recorded musical bits and then kind of pieced them together with Pro Tools. Is there an artificiality to that? I think you can argue that. But at the same time, it was very important to us that what you’re listening to is those moments as they were happening for the first time. It was really important for us to do that, because we felt that the last two or three records we’d done before St. Anger were so over-produced that we had kind of beaten the moments out of them, that they became almost laboratory creations or something." — CC

ONE OF THE MORE AMUSING MOMENTS in Some Kind of Monster involves a computer animation that was posted on-line by a disgruntled admirer after Ulrich ratted on thousands of fans who were downloading Metallica songs on Napster. In the clip, Ulrich is depicted as a greedy, weasel-faced snitch; meanwhile, Hetfield, a stocky Frankenstein’s monster, grunts compliantly. But as in Paradise Lost, the story of three teenage misfits convicted of a hideous child-murder spree in rural Arkansas, Sinofsky and Berlinger resist turning their subjects into cartoons, even when the subjects all but beg for it. (At one point, Elektra wanted to chop the footage up into an Osbournes-style reality series, but Metallica responded by buying out the label’s stake and giving the filmmakers total control.) With Hetfield gone indefinitely, Sinofsky and Berlinger turn to fleshing out their characters. Ulrich’s grizzled papa makes a sublime entrance, looking like a cross between Obi Wan Kenobi and the ghost of Hamlet’s father. After Lars admits he’s still in need of his father’s approval, they repair to the studio, where Torben listens to the album’s prospective lead single and renders an august judgment. "If I was an adviser," he croaks, in a line destined to be echoed in control rooms around the world, "I would say, ‘Delete it.’ "

Behind the voyeuristic spectacle of seeing a majestic metal band unmasked as a group of pampered, backstabbing millionaires who need their hands held, Some Kind of Monster asks a few serious questions, chief among them, "Is all this worth it?" Hetfield, for one, has destroyed himself by attempting to personify the heroic ideals and hard living embodied in the band’s lyrics and image. For him, the monster of the title is indeed the band: "To me, it’s been a beast, and it’s sucked a lot of me into it." "And you were at one time the beast master," Towle reminds him. In his more lucid moments, Hetfield admits that firing Newsted for recording a side project may have been a bit extreme: "I didn’t want him to feel that Metallica wasn’t enough. The way I learned how to love things was to choke them to death." While Hetfield’s away, Ulrich arranges a meeting with estranged lead-guitarist Dave Mustaine, who in 1983 was sacked for excessive drinking. (Despite recurrent battles with drugs and alcohol, Mustaine went on to found Megadeth, a platinum-selling band who are almost as respected as Metallica.) Instead of burying the hatchet, though, Mustaine plants it in Ulrich’s chest, unleashing a self-pitying tirade that begins, "People hate me because of you!", and goes downhill from there.

Eventually, the band rally together to repel their common enemies — a radio-station syndicate wants them to lend their voice to a promotional cash give-away, and the increasingly invasive Dr. Phil has progressed from flyering the studio with posters reading "Get in the Zone!" to suggesting lyric changes. But the group’s underlying tensions aren’t so much resolved as swept under the rug. Hetfield’s first order of business after getting sober is to suggest that making a film about a band mired in turmoil might not have been such a bright idea. The band and the filmmakers argue over whether to continue, and that becomes the crux of the film. Is the beastly entity larger than any one of them (Ulrich)? Or is it subservient to the needs of the individual parts (Hetfield)? They agree to disagree.

Like my favorite Metallica album, 1988’s epic . . . And Justice for All, Some Kind of Monster feels about a half-hour too long, and yet it left me wanting more. (A greatly expanded DVD edition is already in the works.) A dozen years ago, in a scene from the direct-to-video A Year and a Half in the Life of Metallica (which chronicled the making of the group’s breakthrough, the so-called "Black Album"), Hetfield was seen glaring at the television as the first President Bush announced the first Gulf War. It was a poignant image; around the same time, John Kerry took the floor of the Senate to read aloud from Dalton Trumbo’s Johnny Got His Gun, the anti-war novel that Metallica had adapted a few years earlier for their first mainstream hit, "One." In Some Kind of Monster, the band live in a claustrophobic cocoon. It’s a shock to learn that the Mustaine conversation took place on September 13, 2001; in the absence of any mention of September 11, you’re left to conclude that they simply didn’t notice. In a matter of a decade, one of the world’s most presciently political bands has become one of its most insular. And as you leave Some Kind of Monster, you may find yourself pondering a question posed by Ulrich in a scene where he’s trying to turn the Napster debacle into the germ of a lyric: " ‘What difference did we make?’ If that question could sort of get thrown out there, but not answered, that would be awesome."