Extremely Loud And Incredibly Close

The documentary Anvil! The Story of Anvil was directed by Sacha Gervasi, who clearly realized very early into the filmmaking process that no one will be able to watch his movie — an affectionate profile of the aging also-ran Canadian metal band Anvil — and not be reminded of This Is Spinal Tap. There’s a disastrous tour that sees the band playing shows to nearly empty venues; there’s the girlfriend of one of the band members who’s also their (incompetent) tour manager; there’s the love-hate relationship between the band’s two core members; and there are the nostalgic memories of the first songs they wrote together. (Spinal Tap’s David St. Hubbins and Nigel Tufnel dreamed of doing a rock opera about Jack the Ripper; Anvil’s Lips Kudlow and Robb Reiner — yes, Robb Reiner — wrote a tune about the Spanish Inquisition called “Thumb Hang.”) The band even visits Stonehenge, for crying out loud, and Gervasi even throws in a winking shot of a dial getting turned up to 11.

But there’s a lot of differences between a documentary and a mockumentary — the absence of mockery, for one thing. It would be very easy to make Kudlow and Reiner look pathetic — the former heavy metal gods who once shared the stage with Bon Jovi, Scorpions, and Whitesnake now wearing their Anvil toques as they work crummy construction and food-service jobs in snowbound Toronto — but they don’t seem that way to Gervasi. The film makes it clear right from the outset that these are talented guys who would have been as successful as any of their peers if only they’d had a couple more breaks. (Maybe they should have held out for a deal with an American label instead of signing with Canada’s Attic Records.) To Gervasi, Kudlow and Reiner’s refusal to give up on their dreams of stardom, even as they turn 50, even as Kudlow borrows money from his older sister to make their 13th album, seems downright noble — inspiring, even. They’ve never sounded better, Kudlow says, and he’s probably right.

Kudlow is the heart and soul of Anvil (and Anvil): even at 50, he still looks like the overgrown kid with the goofy, crooked grin we see in old footage of the band in its prime, playing before gigantic crowds in Japan, using a dildo to play his flying V. When the present-day incarnation of Anvil plays a metal festival in England, you can’t help but be won over by Kudlow’s utterly guileless excitement over finding himself hobnobbing with members of bands like Vanilla Fudge and Black Oak Arkansas. And he’s still writing the exact same brand of Helix-style headbangers he was coming up with back in 1981 — and there’s a heartbreaking scene where a music-label executive listens to about 20 seconds of Anvil’s newest record, This Is Thirteen, and shuts it off, tactfully explaining to Kudlow and Reiner that it’ll be a tough sell in today’s marketplace. He’s right, but he’s missing the essence of Anvil’s appeal — Kudlow’s music may not be ambitious, but the band’s dreams definitely are.

Several times in the film, it looks like Kudlow and Reiner are ready to end the band for good: when a club owner in Prague refuses to pay them, when about 10 people show up to a gig in Germany, when 174 people come to see them play an arena that holds 10,000. Even late in the process of recording This Is Thirteen, the album into which they’ve sunk everything they have, an argument results in Reiner all but quitting the band. (A tearfully contrite Kudlow lures him back, though. Seldom have the words “I love you, man” been this touching — not even in I Love You, Man.)

I can’t say I have much interest in buying any of Anvil’s music — not even their forthcoming Juggernaut of Justice album, which contains the first recording of “Thumb Hang.” But I was certainly rooting for them to finally get the taste of glory they deserve. I won’t give away the ending, except to note that even at their lowest ebb, Spinal Tap always had a ton of fans in Japan.