By Owen Gleiberman Owen Gleiberman is a film critic for EW
It's become a rock cliché to say that heavy metal stars are acting like something out of ''a real-life Spinal Tap.'' So let's get this out of the way: Anvil! The Story of Anvil really is the real-life Spinal Tap. It's a hilarious, and unexpectedly moving, documentary about the greatest metal band you've probably never heard of — Anvil, a crew of Canadian headbangers who came up in the demon-thrash '80s and were potent and original enough to influence the style and sound of Anthrax, Metallica, and Megadeth. We see the band in footage from a 1984 Japan stadium show, and yes, they're pretty great. The lead singer, Steve ''Lips'' Kudlow, scream-snarls with a viciousness that would make Paul Stanley blush under his makeup, and the whole band rockets forward with the kind of hell-bent thunder-god virility that made metal the dominant rock form for a generation.
And then? Then they went nowhere. The film catches up with Lips and his drummer cohort, whose name is Robb Reiner (surely some strange form of Spinal Tap karma), as they go about their cruddy day jobs 25 years later in Toronto. They're family men, and they still love to play, yet the predicament of being has-beens-who-never-made-it-but-know-they-should-have weighs on them like a cosmic curse. At 50, Lips is a frizzy-haired goofball cherub with eyes that still shine like a child's — he's like Howard Stern as drawn by R. Crumb. Like Spinal Tap's Nigel Tufnel, he's a master of the kind of ingenious-stupido metalhead logic that masks egomania in deluded optimism. ''Things went drastically wrong,'' he says of life on the road. ''But at least there was a tour for it to go wrong on!''
Anvil! The Story of Anvil traces the band's attempt at a comeback in 2007, starting with a half-baked tour of grimy rock caverns in the Czech Republic and Transylvania that turns into a series of farcical disasters. From there, they seek out their old producer to record their 13th album and find a kind of triumph. Lips is capable of punching out a shady club owner (we see him do it), or screaming in the face of his buddy and bandmate, Robb (the two look like muffin-faced twins). Yet when he talks about stardom, we see the innocent rock dreamer that he has never stopped being. Lips and Robb might have been famous (they were gypped by fate), but Anvil! understands that the ultimate measure of metal stardom is to remain a legend in your own mind. A
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You have to wonder about a movie called “Anvil! The Story of Anvil.” Is the redundancy in the title self-mocking or just bluntly declarative? It’s a question that lingers around the movie itself, which is either an affectionate chronicle of a Canadian heavy metal band that never quite made it or else a deadpan mockery of the same band.
Or maybe both. Or neither. After a recent screening in Manhattan, two of my colleagues and I spent about 20 minutes on the sidewalk arguing about whether the film was a documentary at all. Evidence that it might have been a clever hoax was suggested by the goofiness of some of the group’s lyrics and album covers (all of which feature, what else? a giant anvil) and by what seemed to be sly references to “This Is Spinal Tap,” the definitive rock-mockumentary. One of the members of Anvil is named Robb Reiner, which is the “Spinal Tap” director’s name with an extra “b.” On a trip to England, Anvil works with a producer whose equipment has knobs that go to 11, and the members of the band make a pilgrimage to Stonehenge. The phrase “who were the Druids?” popped into my head, followed by the question, Who is Anvil?
If my fellow critics and I had better headbanger bona fides we might have known that Anvil is a mighty and awesome Toronto-based quartet that enjoyed a brief heyday in the ’80s and never quite made it big after that. That one of us mistook the group for a put-on is partly a result of the highly theatrical nature of the musical genre itself, even if the musicians’ tongues are everywhere except in their cheeks. It’s also true that Spinal Tap has long since transcended satire and been welcomed into the metal god pantheon.
But there is also a kind of sincerity that can seem to the jaded eye like self-parody, and the earnest, heartfelt striving of the two men at the center of Anvil makes the band’s story more touching than comical. Mockery would be too easy and too mean, and the success of “Anvil! The Story of Anvil” lies in its ability to make you care about an enterprise you might initially have been inclined to laugh at.
The film, directed by Sacha Gervasi (whose screenwriting credits include “The Big Tease” and “The Terminal”), begins with an old clip from a rock festival in Japan, perhaps the high point of Anvil’s early career. After tributes from rockers like Slash of Guns N’ Roses, Lars Ulrich of Metallica and Lemmy Kilmister of Motörhead, we catch up with Anvil at home in Toronto, where after 30 years the band is still thrashing.
Mr. Reiner, who plays drums, and Steve Kudlow, the lead singer and guitarist, who goes by the stage name Lips, turn out to be two nice Jewish boys from Toronto. Now middle-class family men, they seem a bit tired and defeated at times, but they are also open and passionate as well as reasonably talented. They met as teenagers, and the enthusiasm for music that they shared then has hardly waned, even as their partnership has clearly endured some ups and downs.
Their relationship, as complicated and in its way as beautiful as a long, rough marriage, emerges as the film’s dramatic heart, even as its narrative is focused on their attempt to make one last lunge for glory and recognition. They undertake a tour of Europe under the wing of an ardently well-intentioned, spectacularly incompetent manager and then try to drum up record-industry interest in their 13th album. It’s painful to watch them work so hard for so little, though it’s also frequently funny. And their resilience, quixotic though it may be, is also inspiring. How can you not root for them? They’re such nice guys, and so devoted to their art.
“Anvil! The Story of Anvil” (I’m starting to love that title, by the way) may not change your opinion of heavy metal. I confess it did not inspire me to seek out CDs like “Hard ’N’ Heavy,” “Metal on Metal” and “Worth the Weight.” But it might make you think in new ways about a cruel cultural logic that increasingly obliterates the middle ground between success and failure. Mr. Reiner and Mr. Kudlow may not quite merit full-metal glory, but they don’t deserve oblivion either, and “Anvil! The Story of Anvil” makes both a case and a place for their band.
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