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Fade to black
Metallica spill their guts on the big screen
BY CARLY CARIOLI
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Metallica, we’re told at the beginning of the new documentary from Paradise Lost directors Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky, are the biggest heavy-metal band of all time. In his metalography Sound of the Beast (Harper Collins), critic Ian Christie notes that in their first 15 years, Metallica moved more records than the Rolling Stones have sold in their entire career, much of that total accrued without radio or MTV airplay. When the film joins Metallica, in the first month of 2001, the group have been dormant for several years. Long-time bass player Jason Newsted, who was young enough to have been a fan of the band before he replaced the late, great Cliff Burton, has departed in acrimony. The remaining members, no longer on speaking terms, have been disparaging one another in the media. Like the Stones, Metallica are a multi-million-dollar corporation as much as they are an iconic rock band; the profits they bring their record company, Elektra (which was dismantled not long after the film wrapped), are so lucrative that the band receive about four times as much per album as most of their peers get. Such a moneymaker cannot be allowed to crumble, so the band’s management company sends in a corporate fixer — Dr. Phil Towle, a therapist and "performance-enhancement coach" whose specialty is motivating sports teams — to put Metallica back together again, at least long enough to record a new album. That’s the film’s premise: the world’s most famous headbangers get subjected to a head shrinking. Some Kind of Monster is a new breed of rockumentary, though it has many precedents. Like the Beatles’ Let It Be, it’s an exhaustive (three years condensed into 135 minutes) portrait of an outfit making an album while discovering it doesn’t like itself very much. As a fly-on-the-wall document of insecure middle-aged rock stars making asses of themselves, it has moments of This Is Spinal Tap comedy. In revealing the bourgeois mundanity behind a heavy-metal monster, it suggests The Osbournes. As the band’s ferocious leader, James Hetfield, uneasily warms to the language of therapy, you might recall The Sopranos. And the film’s short-circuited redemptive ending scans like an instant Behind the Music. But what the movie really has going for it are three great characters, each maintaining his own fiefdom in the group’s creative kingdom. Singer/guitarist Hetfield, the solemn, alcoholic cowboy, is the son of working-class Jehovah’s Witnesses; he warms up before each show by singing along to the band’s entrance music, the Ennio Morricone theme from The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. Drummer Lars Ulrich, the privileged son of famous Danish tennis pro Torben Ulrich, is a smug dilettante who styles himself a European intellectual. (As a teen, he imported the obscure British metal albums on which Metallica modeled their early successes; these days, he collects pricy modern art.) And the air-headed, helium-voiced lead-guitarist Kirk Hammett is a surfing Buddhist and budding equestrian who follows orders while attempting, like the put-upon child in a bad marriage, to keep the peace. I saw the film in a roomful of Metallica fans, and Hammett got the biggest laughs: every time he opens his mouth, his band mates’ eyes roll back in their heads. The recording sessions begin amiably enough: Hetfield growls into the microphone with his toddler son, Castor, perched on his lap, and during a break, Ulrich’s young son does a flailing impersonation of his dad’s technique. But the band’s well has run dry: for the first time in their career, they enter the studio without any songs written, planning to perform spontaneously and edit the results on computer. As part of Dr. Phil’s regimen of group therapy and daily affirmation ("We become healers of ourselves," reads one mission statement), each member is asked to share his area of expertise. When Hetfield admits his bandmates into the lyric-writing process, the group sessions yield clunkers like Hammett’s "My lifestyle determines my deathstyle." Hammett, a speedy shredder adrift in a musical era that’s shunned showy technical proficiency, is told his comrades want to eliminate all guitar solos from the album; it’s such a cruel suggestion that at first you think it must be some surprise reality-show plot twist, à la Joe Millionaire. They are, however, dead serious. Despite Dr. Phil’s best efforts — or more likely because of them — the band quickly come unglued. Hetfield takes a two-week Russian vacation to hunt bears and guzzle vodka, missing Castor’s first birthday. There’s no chemistry among the players, and they revert to untidy, supine bundles of need and anxiety. Their sparring escalates from pithy passive-aggressiveness to outright hostility to childish tantrums. Hetfield: "You’ve been pickin’ at me all night!" Ulrich: "You’re being a total dick!" With that, Hetfield storms out, checks himself into rehab, and disappears for the better part of a year.
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