The band you only thought you knew…

“I met those guys once,” a friend told me when we were discussing this film.  I asked what they were like and his response was simple: “Total egomaniacs.”  Considering that the boys from Metallica are some of the biggest rock stars on the planet, that fact might go without saying, but one cannot help but notice glimpses of that in the two hour and twenty minute Metallica: Some Kind of Monster.  We here a few too many times about what they are going through, how much they contribute, and how much money they have for it to go unnoticed.  That is one small aspect of an otherwise penetrating film.  In all that has been done on Metallica over the years, nothing has come as close as this film to exposing the true core of the band, and we see how close they were to disintegrating.

Documentaries have become trendy lately, with high profile releases like Fahrenheit 9/11 and Super Size Me.  But in those films what we are seeing is a kind of personal filmmaking that is not exactly a true documentary.  The term seems to be applied out of mere convenience.  No so with this film.  Some Kind of Monster is as true a documentary as ever there has been, weaving a deep and involved story out of the three years the filmmakers spent following the group.  The film opens around the release of St. Anger, and the band fields the usual questions about what they have been up to, what it was like making their first record without bassist Jason Newstead (who had abruptly left the group), and why the new album took so long to come out.  Of course, over the course of the film we get the answers to these questions, and we see the band fragment, completely splinter itself, only to be rebuilt again.

Some Kind of Monster does not require that the viewer know anything about Metallica, heavy metal music or anything else.  The film made me think of Jean Luc Godard’s documentary about The Rolling Stones, Sympathy for the Devil, in that we see the progression of this album from the first rudimentary riffs to the finished product.  We get all the necessary exposition early on in the film: Metallica is the biggest heavy band of all time, they’ve sold untold millions of albums over a career that spanning two decades, and now they are on each others nerves.  The relationship between James Hetfield and Lars Ulrich, the Lennon and McCartney of heavy metal, is now a poisonous one, and the two are unable to function together.  “I’m not really enjoying being in a room playing with you.”  It is that simple.  We hear from Newstead and learn that he left the band partly because of stifled creativity, brought on by the iron fisted control that Hetfield and Ulrich hold over the band, and “the physical damage I’ve done to myself playing the music live.”  Producer Bob Rock is sitting in on bass, and Metallica has another new member: therapist Phil Towle, whom the band pays $40,000 a month to bring peace and healing.

The band rents an empty barracks at the Presidio in San Francisco and begins recording.  They decide to go into it with no riffs, no titles, nothing, and they improvise to find their way.  The Presidio sessions, while combative at times, come to a halt when Hetfield enters rehab.  He disappears, and the rest of the group does not know if or when he will ever return.  He finally does come back a year later, strictly following the rules of rehab.  He can only work four hours a day, for one, and that drives Ulrich crazy.  All the while Towle does little, the bare minimum required to maintain his lofty paycheck, until Ulrich and Hetfield finally come to a decision both are happy with: firing Phil.  The healing slowly begins and the band moves on with recording.

There are moments in Metallica: Some Kind of Monster that seem ripe for parody, or like they are deleted scenes from This Is Spinal Tap.  Just about every scene with Towle fits this mold, as does Ulrich’s long haired hippy father and the band’s manager.  Some of the band’s bickering has the feeling of a future Saturday Night Live skit.  Through it all we get a brave picture of the band.  The principals are not always shown in the most flattering light, and even Hetfield has some second thoughts about the documentary when he returns from his rehab stint, so maybe the fact that we even have this film to see is a testament to the band’s fearlessness.

They finally finish the album and we are back at the press junkets we saw at the beginning of the film.  The band is asked the usual questions, and the answer in a way that we know is not quite in tune with the reality of the situation.  We end as they start off their tour in June of 2003, and it is fitting that Metallica comes out to the score from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, for that is what we have just seen, everything about the band that is good, bad and ugly.  (I saw Metallica perform about a month after the June 2003 show that closes the film, and looking back it is hard to believe that they were able to put on such a great show after going through all of that, and considering everything that happened, I was probably lucky to have been able to see them at all.)