Music On Film is a column from The Dissolve recommending movies fans of music should make a point of checking out.
When a band gets big enough, it ceases to become primarily an organic artistic creation. It’s no longer a matter of writing a great song or album but rather about keeping a miniature industry of roadies and managers and lawyers and agents and assistants and other hangers-on afloat and functioning.
At a certain size, a band becomes a machine of commerce that must be greased and finessed and manipulated or it will break down entirely. By the time Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky (who died February 21st, just a few weeks before the death of mentor Albert Maysles) brought their cameras to the recording sessions of what would become St. Anger, the angry, profane, roaring beast that was Metallica had long since reached that point.
The group’s management team, in a fit of desperation, hires "performance enhancement coach" Phil Towle, a gooberish middle aged man who bears a distinct resemblance to television Dr. Phil in both looks and personality, to oversee therapy sessions to get the band functioning again.
When Berlinger and Sinofsky brought their cameras to The Presidio, a former military base where recordings began, but pointedly did not end, they had no idea whether there would be a band or a movie at the end of the journey. They couldn’t have known whether they were chronicling a band’s end, like the Beatles documentary Let It Be or its creative resurgence. But like the Maysles before them, Berlinger and Sinofsky were blessed with tremendous patience and curiosity.
So the filmmakers waited it out along with the band as it went through a series of crises that both tested the band and made it stronger, from James Hetfield’s absences and eventual recovery from alcoholism to the backlash that followed the band’s attack on Napster to having to find a new bassist to replace the departing Jason Newsted.
As with the films about the West Memphis 3 that brought Berlinger and Sinofsky into Metallica’s circle (Metallica agreed to let the filmmakers use their music for their films about the wrongly imprisoned teens, a huge coup for up and coming filmmakers), the filmmakers are obsessed with the intricacies, joys and heartache of process. They’re fascinated by the act of a band pulling itself apart to try to figure out its underlying dysfunction so that something that once must have felt like the most natural thing in the world but over the years began to feel almost impossible—Lars Ulrich, Kirk Hammett and James Hetfield playing new music in a room together—can happen again and Metallica Inc. can resume operations.
One of the darkly comic contradictions of Metallica: Some Kind of Monster is that it takes months upon months upon months of hard work, honesty, cutting through bullshit and rigorous honesty for Metallica to make an emotional breakthrough and create what appears, to untrained ears, to be some of the worst music of their career.
The album whose torturous creation Some Kind of Monster so unforgettably documents is particularly feeble from a lyrical standpoint. Apparently it took the intervention of Phil and months of therapy for one of the biggest and most important rock bands of all time to write lyrics that sound like they were cribbed from the diary of a pretentious goth teenager. Yet it’s a testament to what a strange and singular rock documentary the film is that it’s redeemed less by the frequently awful music but rather brutal introspection from some of the dudes in pop culture you’d least expect to acknowledge their emotions, let alone spend an entire film talking about feelings.