Head Trip
Perhaps the most unlikely thing to capture on film is the creative process — the spinning of gears, the tripping of wires, the breaking of hearts and the snapping of tempers that go into the making of art. Too much has to be explained, and the magic loses its luster in the diagramming of the trick. For that reason alone, Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky’s Metallica: Some Kind of Monster should be celebrated: The movie permits us to hover without a narrator from first riff to last encore, during which Metallica finds a new record and itself just as it all seems to be coming apart.
What began as a promotional film intended to document the making of last year’s St. Anger ended up as one of the greatest rock documentaries ever made, up there with D.A. Pennebaker’s Dylan film Don’t Look Back, the Al and David Maysles’ Altamont autopsy Gimme Shelter, and Robert Frank’s drugged-out Stones film Cocksucker Blues. Some Kind of Monster shrinks the arena-sized images of singer-guitarist James Hetfield, drummer Lars Ulrich and guitarist Kirk Hammett to life-sized portraits of average men overwhelmed by their own creation. At times, you wonder why these 40-year-olds are even in this band; its mere existence seems destined to ruin their lives.
The movie opens with Metallica moving into the Presidio, the old military base in San Francisco, to begin recording its eighth studio album. It’s 2001, and the band’s in shit shape: Bassist Jason Newsted has quit to play with his quasi-funk-rock trio, Echobrain, and Ulrich’s campaign against Napster has alienated some of the band’s biggest fans. The band members and producer Bob Rock (filling in on bass) hope the atmosphere will revitalize Metallica and help make it a unit that moves in the same direction rather than three guys falling away from one another. They also enter group therapy. Never again will you listen to a Metallica album without wanting to give Hetfield a reassuring hug. At the suggestion of therapist Phil Towle (helpful to the point of becoming overbearing), Hetfield invites Ulrich and Hammett to write lyrics for the first time.
But 44 days into recording, Hetfield disappears — first to Russia, where he drinks vodka like water and kills bears for sport, and then into rehab. A planned 6-month stint stretches well past a year. When he does return, with the band recording in a new studio, he has all kinds of guidelines, including the mandate that he can work only from noon to 4 p.m. That infuriates Ulrich, who finally explodes with decades’ worth of pent-up frustration. The friendship that became a partnership appears to have devolved into an abusive relationship. Ulrich even seems to take pleasure in drinking booze around his newly sober bandmate.
It’s during Hetfield’s rehab stay that some of the most mesmerizing and heartbreaking things occur. At Towle’s insistence, Ulrich meets with Dave Mustaine, who was ousted from the band in the early 1980s before he could self-destruct and take the band with him. The Megadeth frontman, a heap of red hair and regret, tells the drummer he’d “give anything for that chance” to go back to 1982 and repair his relationship with his “little Danish friend.” Part of you wants to laugh at his self-pity; he was in Megadeth, for Christ’s sake. But you’re also forced to recognize how badly he was treated back then, when Hetfield and Ulrich and the late bassist Cliff Burton were just kids who were more concerned with making it than with helping a friend get clean. But it’s like Hetfield says when talking about Newsted’s departure, which Hetfield expedited by refusing to allow him to participate in a side project: “The way I learn how to love things is to choke ’em to death.” That he and his band still live is astonishing enough. That you get to see how and why in a movie so painfully intimate is nothing short of extraordinary.
