Chasing the dream

Anvil: The Story of Anvil is a sad but
inspiring documentary on a 35-year-old
Canadian metal band

DON’T CALL IT A COMEBACK: Anvil: The Story of Anvil

by MALCOLM FRASER

A hit on the festival circuit over the past year, Sacha Gervasi’s documentary Anvil: The Story of Anvil tells the tale of a Canadian heavy metal band who never made it, but are still chasing the dream after 35 years. Although the hilariously redundant title and the undeniable parallels to Spinal Tap might suggest a parody, Anvil is actually by turns profoundly sad and genuinely inspiring.

The film opens with footage from a Japanese rock festival in Anvil’s ’80s heyday (where they shared the stage with Bon Jovi and other major acts), intercut with testimonials to the band’s importance from metal icons Lemmy, Slash and Lars Ulrich. Gervasi then cuts to the present day, where the two original members, Steve “Lips” Kudlow and Robb Reiner, do menial labour in suburban Toronto while plotting Anvil’s triumphant comeback.

While Reiner is a gentle giant who paints in his spare time, Kudlow is an extroverted, expulsive man-child. Eternally optimistic— “Things went drastically wrong,” he remarks after a disastrous tour, “but at least there was a tour for it to go wrong on”—he reacts badly when his naïve bubble is burst. As in Some Kind of Monster, when the bandmates fight, there’s a voyeuristic fascination in seeing issues come to a head between men who’ve never had to learn the nuances of adult interaction. One big difference, of course, is that Metallica never had to remortgage their houses to pay for studio time.

For anyone familiar with the daily grind and little humiliations of the DIY indie rock world, watching the members of Anvil still struggling with shady promoters, sketchy record executives and tiny audiences is truly painful. Gervasi, an English director who wrote the Spielberg/ Hanks tearjerker The Terminal, plays the pathos to the hilt, with David Torn’s score none too subtly underlining each emotion.

But if the film is sentimental to the point of melodrama, it’s never condescending, which it could so easily have been in lesser hands. Gervasi, who was actually an Anvil roadie as a teenager, treats the band with respect, crafting a thoughtful study of the line between persistence and delusion. By the end, you may find yourself raising devil horns for these lunkheads who’ve never given up on their dreams.

ANVIL: THE STORY OF ANVIL OPENS
THIS FRIDAY, APRIL 17