Heavy Meddle

Films about artists are a dime a dozen, because all moviemakers consider themselves artists, and they want to depict their struggles onscreen. Yet the medium has never been interested in depicting the creative process honestly and in detail. Art is imagination plus willpower, but most movies treat creativity nonrationally, as a magic force that can be unleashed by the right incantation, like the scene in Mr. Holland's Opus where the hero tells a mediocre and distracted student musician to "Just play the sunset," and suddenly she sounds great.

Nonfiction filmmakers Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky either didn't get the memo on how to make a movie about artists or they read it and tore it up. Their new movie Some Kind of Monster, which follows Metallica through the creation of a new album and two years of group therapy, is marred by overlength, a couple of cornball montages and a tendency to embrace the usual rock cliches.

Yet it's still an absorbing, one-of-a-kind documentary that offers more insight into the creative process than any film since Mike Leigh's Topsy-Turvy. Watching vocalist/rhythm guitarist James Hetfield, lead guitarist Kirk Hammett, drummer Lars Ulrich and producer and sometime bassist Bob Rock record and re-record St. Anger, you don't just sense the interplay between art and life; you see it.

As the story begins, there's a lot riding on the as-yet-untitled album. Bassist Jason Newsted has just left to form a new group, Echobrain. A year earlier, Metallica led a p.r. and legal attack against file-sharing service Napster, prompting fan backlash, and it hasn't released an album of original material since 1997's ReLoad. To get the fire going again, the three founding members plus Bob Rock rent space at San Francisco's Presidio military base to record a truly collaborative work, setting aside the usual divisions of labor and encouraging every musician to work on every part of every new song. Most remarkably, Metallica agrees with management's suggestion to bring in therapist/performance coach Phil Towle. Towle hovers at the margins of every recording session and group discussion, chiming in to help Metallica resolve emotional "issues" that seem to be affecting the work.

What the band hoped would be a several- month process stretches out over two years, thanks to infighting, focus problems and the temporary departure of Hetfield, the group's mercurial figurehead, to enter rehab. Hetfield emerges months later with the mandate to concentrate on his home life. This means working on St. Anger no more than four hours a day—and since Hetfield is super-defensive about Metallica making even small decisions without him, he asks that his bandmates quit working after four hours as well. Ulrich, Hammett and Rock agree but secretly think the request is ridiculous, and pretty soon they're poring over recordings as soon as Hetfield leaves the building. When Hetfield figures out the band has ignored his wishes, he can barely contain his fury; Hammett observes, "That's just like the last 15 years for me."

From the opening minutes, Berlinger and Sinofsky depict the members of Metallica not as rock gods but as regular folks with musical talent and money. They're longtime bad boys who lived to see their forties and have settled down. The film pokes fun at the members of Metallica for their psychotherapeutic spelunking, as well it should. They make fun of it too—and their contemporaries are even more ruthless. (Newsted describes the shrink-on-retainer solution as, "really fucking lame and weak.") Yet they go forward with the plan because it gives them permission to confront one another, transcend their differences and do good work.

Towle is an amusing figure; with his ready-for-NPR voice and blank stare, he's like a cartoon parody of a modern psychiatrist. Berlinger and Sinofsky wring laughs from his presence by starting argument scenes with tight shots of bandmembers confronting one another, then revealing Towle's presence by cutting to him in isolated closeup, listening. At times Towle seems as starstruck as any fan, and almost as needy as the men he's counseling. (By year two of group therapy, Hetfield deadpans, "I'm afraid he thinks he's a member of the band.")

But in the end, Towle does Metallica a lot of good. He's such an influential presence in their lives that after the band sacks him and Some Kind of Monster eases into a more traditional finale, showing how the band finished and promoted their smash album, its momentum disappears. This is partly due to the film's extreme length (140 minutes, at least 30 of which were unnecessary) and partly due to the fact that when Metallica collectively decides they don't need Towle anymore, the film has already reached an emotional climax and has no use for another.

The film's true subject is the creative process as great leveler. Metallica may be millionaires, but as they punch and hack their way through St. Anger—and struggle to find a new bassist, a position eventually filled by Robert Trujillo—they're as fragile as garage-band dreamers, and their emotions are transparent. Hetfield is a charismatic leader who projects a smoldering resentment—of what, we're not sure, though he's got plenty of past misfortunes to choose from. Ulrich is his foil, a sarcastic, observant wiseass who often seems to oppose the other band members' opinions on principle, because someone has to. After the genial Hammett tries out a scorching guitar solo, Ulrich questions whether that particular song should even have one, because guitar solos aren't popular right now and nobody wants the song to be dated. Hammett replies that by not having a guitar solo, Metallica would then date the song "to this moment"—a point that seems merely defensive but is actually quite valid.

Berlinger, Sinofsky and their collaborators maintain ironic distance from start to finish and display it through camerawork and cutting. Without making a big deal of it, they notice that Ulrich gets rid of old stuff (even his prized art collection) when he enters a new phase of life, but Hetfield holds on to the first amp he ever owned and a warm-up cassette given to him by a vocal coach 12 years earlier. The filmmakers have a sharp eye for juxtaposition too. When Ulrich visits a gallery displaying his art collection, he's so excited that on the way out, he jumps up and slaps the top of a doorway; the camera pans right to reveal museum employees cleaning up a glass Ulrich broke minutes earlier. The pan is both a nifty visual joke and a veiled comment on the lives of rich men, who have armies of people cleaning up messes they don't even remember making.

Berlinger and Sinofsky got to know Metallica a decade ago while making Paradise Lost, a documentary about outcast rural headbangers prosecuted for ritual murder in West Memphis, AR. The filmmakers used Metallica as temporary music during editing, because the killers loved heavy metal, Metallica especially. Metallica, which had never licensed its music for a movie before, liked Paradise Lost enough to give the filmmakers a whole Metallica soundtrack. For years after that, the band and the filmmakers talked about doing a movie together, but waited to proceed until Metallica decided to record a new album with a therapist on standby.

I don't think either Metallica or Berlinger/Sinofsky truly believe in the healing power of therapy, despite their public praise of it. More likely they believe in John Lennon and Elton John's maxim, "Whatever gets you through the night"—and that's okay, because it's a grownup attitude. One also gets the sense that the filmmakers don't necessarily adore Metallica's music (they've admitted they never really listened to metal until Paradise Lost) but respect the band as longtime working artists trying to keep their edge. Anyone who's ever tried to create something needs to see this movie.

AFRAID OF EVERYTHING If you miss black-and-white—particularly black-and-white movies from the 1960s, when new-school storytelling met new-school techniques—see writer-director David Barker's tiny New York indie that opens this week at the Two Boots Pioneer Theater. This tale of an agoraphobic French woman recovering from a car accident and getting to know her half-sister who's visiting from Israel has such a muted narrative and laid-back style that while you're watching it, you feel as though you're rediscovering an interesting small film you saw years ago.

With alert performances by Nathalie Richard and Sarah Adler as the sisters and Daniel Aukin as the heroine's husband, and striking photography by Deborah Lewis, Afraid of Everything can be quite pleasing if you're in the right frame of mind. (The depopulated interiors, captured in wide shots whenever possible, reminded me of Haskell Wexler's work on Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?) There's no world-shaking chutzpah on display here, just charm and intelligence. o