A former roadie for Canadian heavy metal group, Anvil, director Sacha Gervasi catches up with the band twenty years on as they make a last ditch attempt at success.
It's possible, if not probable that you've not heard of Anvil; I'm ashamed to say that I hadn't. Thankfully, right from the get-go Gervasi shows us how fucking awesome they were by having metal legend after metal legend sing their praises. Tom Araya from Slayer, Scott Ian from Anthrax, Lars Ulrich from Metallica; When people that cool tell you the band were good, you soon sit up and start paying attention. While archival footage shows Anvil playing a stadium in Tokyo, Japan, an audience going wild for their theatrical performance and extrordinary musicianship, the talking headbangers wonder what happened after, since Avil's album Metal on Metal was so influential on them. It turns out that the band carried on putting out music, but outside of a small, dedicated fanbase, no one was listening. While their progenitors thrived throughout the eighties and beyond, Anvil got by in blue collar jobs. Watching Steve "Lips" Kudlow, a man able to command the attention of a crowd of thousands making a living out of delivering school dinners reminds you just how fickle and luck based the entertainment industry is. What makes the film, and the band special though, is that there isn't an overwhelming sense of failure or regret. The band carried on with Lips and best friend and drummer Robb Reiner (we'll get to the irony of that name later) at their core. They scraped together the cash that wasn't being used to support their families to put out albums, all for the love of the music.
Lips and Reiner seem like genuinely nice guys, and they look like they're entertaining as hell to be around. For a start, they're Candaian, which gives them a fantastic accent and folksy charm, which when combined with the overblown histrionics of heavy metal results in comedy gold. This is probably the point to bring up the shadow that looms large of this documentary: This is Spinal Tap. It's pretty amazing just how many times this film reminds you of that mockumentary. It seems like it's both that the other Rob Reiner's movie was pretty much bang on in representing rock bands, but also that it's become such a cultural touchstone that the band feel like they should live up to the image; you're never sure where reality and knowing self-parody begin and end. Since it's pretty clear that most people will be thinking about Spinal Tap at some point, Gervasi embraces it, realising that scenes like Lips and Reiner talking about one of their early songs is errily reminiscent of a similar scene between Christopher Guest and Michael McKean, and going so far as to include a close up of an amp being turned up to eleven.
I really loved Anvil! The Story of Anvil. It's film that wears it's heart on its sleeve, daring you to feel anything but admiration and affection for its subjects. While a young teenager on a reality TV show might talk about deserving fame and fortune because they've worked hard for a few weeks and believe themselves to be on some kind of great journey, this is a film that shows what the genuine reality for most musicians is like. These are guys who've worked hard, struggled, and done it because they love being in a rock band. By the end of the documentary's brief running time, you're genuinely invested in seeing the band achieve some form of success, and what ends up happening is really poinagnt.
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