Anvil!

Reviewer: Jeremy Hatch
Rating (out of 5): ****

When they were thirteen years old, Steve "Lips" Kudlow and Robb Reiner formed a band -- they called it Anvil -- and promised to rock together forever. But unlike virtually all of those who make this vow, they've actually managed to keep it for over thirty-five years, despite crushing setbacks that would have broken up most groups long since.

In the opening sequence of Sacha Gervasi's documentary about the band, we're introduced to an Anvil poised for a career as a marquee metal band. Archival footage shows Anvil in the early 1980s, touring and performing in Japan with the likes of Scorpions and Bon Jovi, playing before an audience of tens of thousands, and interviews with various rock luminaries (including Metallica's Lars Ulrich and Anthrax's Scott Ian) indicate that their 1982 album Metal on Metal influenced an entire generation of rock musicians. But then something happened, and they fell from view. As the film opens, Lips and Reiner have fallen very far indeed. Two of the original band members left long ago for greener pastures (to be replaced by talented superfans thrilled to be in the band), Lips works a job delivering food to school cafeterias, and Reiner, appropriately enough for a metal drummer, is operating a jackhammer of some sort when we first see him.

They have been writing songs, recording albums, and touring and gigging in a modest way all along, but they're still hoping for another big break. Their persistent hope seems insanely quixotic, but over the course of those three decades and more, Lips and Robb have become as close as family. They couldn't break up any more easily than siblings can stop being siblings. And when they argue, it turns into the spectacular kind of blow-up that leaves everybody in tears and professing love for one another, and of course the music.

When the opportunity arises to go on a European tour, and maybe even get a break, they seize it even though it makes little sense (a European tour? for what fans?) and is booked by a well-meaning but inexperienced manager whose five-week tour turns out to be something of a fiasco.

Back at home, broke after five weeks on the road because most of their profit was spent on gas and transportation, the ever-optimistic Lips counts his blessings and decides that the time has come to get an album produced correctly once and for all, to give them one last shot at fame. He sends a demo tape off to Chris Tsangarides, one of the great sound engineers of rock music who had produced two of their early albums.

Surprisingly, Tsangarides decides he wants to work with them, flies Lips and Reiner out to London to discuss the details, and ends up producing their 13th album in his personal studio. The events that follow are both unpredictably moving and wonderful.

Anvil! has many parallels with Rob Reiner's This is Spinal Tap, including the weird coincidence of names, and filmmaker Gervasi planted a few sly nods throughout -- one close-up on an amp shows a hand turning it up to eleven, and in another scene, Lips and Reiner are in a diner discussing the first song they wrote -- but this is no mockumentary. There's something inherently ridiculous about aged rockers, whether they're successful or not, but well before the end you're no longer laughing at Lips and Reiner; instead you're rooting for them to make it big, or at least to make it enough that they can be free from their day jobs. Anvil! is mostly about the hard work of practicing an art for the love of it, without regard to success or failure, but all the same: it's deeply satisfying to see these men begin to realize their dreams while they still can.

The DVD includes half a dozen deleted scenes, Gervasi's uncut interview with Lars Ulrich, and a commentary track with the director, Lips, and Reiner. All of the extras are worth checking out. I rarely get through an entire commentary track, but this one was different: not only entertaining, it enriches the film with new information, illuminating the background of several key developments in the story.