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Sunday, Jul 12, 2009
A cross between "Spinal Tap" and wrenching psychodrama, this movie has you rooting for the band's success whether you're a metalhead or not.
Jul 9, 2004 | Near the end of the mesmerizing documentary "Metallica: Some Kind of Monster," Metallica drummer and co-founder Lars Ulrich reflects on the global phenomenon his band has become. Nobody has ever done what Metallica has done, he says (I'm paraphrasing here) -- create loud, aggressive rock music that isn't based on negative energy. I don't know how much I buy any aspect of that statement, but it's a revealing comment, and one that speaks directly to the contradictions of this fascinating movie from Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky (directors of "Brother's Keeper" and "Paradise Lost"), which veers unpredictably between wrenching psychodrama and "Spinal Tap"-style mockumentary.
"Some Kind of Monster" depicts a major rock band in near-total meltdown, but very little of it goes the way you'd expect. Ulrich may be trying to make sense of his own journey, which comes pretty close to the standard rock-star dream: He was once a Danish-born outcast in suburban California, listening to obscure import metal singles in his bedroom; now he's a middle-aged zillionaire with a supermodel wife and a collection of contemporary art that warrants its own sale at Christie's. (He drinks himself into a stupor at the Manhattan auction house while he watches it go.)
But while big-money decadence is nothing new in rock 'n' roll, it has never looked quite so, well, normal. Ulrich, along with bemuscled singer-guitarist James Hetfield and lead guitarist Kirk Hammett, has ridden the ultimate musical expression of teen rebellion to almost uncountable piles of cash. But they utterly lack the pseudo-intellectual manner of a Mick Jagger or Bono, or the mystical pretensions of Zeppelin or Floyd. For better or worse, they're just richer, older versions of the dudes from suburban Cali they always were. As this intimate portrait makes clear, even they seem to feel ambivalent about their success, and more than a little depressed.
Can a musical style driven by adolescent testosterone overdrive still thrive when its leading band consists of three rich guys who sit around in hotel suites with a suntanned shrink, talking about their abandonment issues? What is lost (and what is gained) when a beloved subculture of the '80s turns into the mainstream mass culture of the '90s and beyond? (This last question, as you might have noticed, is one of the defining cultural quandaries of our era.) Berlinger and Sinofsky's film is less a standard rockumentary than an exploration of these unanswerable questions; you might call it an inquiry into the crisis of masculinity that also happens, every now and then, to rock out massively.
"Metallica: Some Kind of Monster"
Directed by Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky
Obviously Metallica fans and former fans will need to see this movie, to cheer or sneer as the case may be. But I didn't much care about the band or its members one way or another before sitting down to watch "Some Kind of Monster" -- I don't really listen to metal, but I know I'm supposed to respect Metallica for their integrity and their superior musicianship -- and I came away enthralled, enraged, perplexed and confounded.
Ultimately this film has more to say to nonfans than to those with a preexisting passionate relationship to Metallica and its members. Music geeks may argue about the question of whether this is the most exacting depiction of how exactly a rock band functions in the studio. But for other viewers, it's an unstinting, almost clinical study of three essentially likable American guys facing midlife crisis, who happen to be at the very pinnacle of corporate rock. (I don't mean that as a pejorative; it's just true.)
