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The year is 2001. Thrash pioneers and stadium mainstays Metallica have been in the doldrums for half a decade; the grungey, hard rock gristle of their last two records, Load and Reload, and reconfiguration as short-haired, eyeliner-wearing Anton Corbijn muses have alienated them from their headbanger OG fans; inter-band relations are at a low ebb and longtime bassist Jason Newsted has jumped. Meanwhile, the tectonics of the heavy music landscape are shifting around them – the solipsistic dirge of nu-metal now energising the disenfranchised youth of America. It’s time for a rebirth.
Regrouping in San Francisco, singer and guitarist James Hetfield, drummer Lars Ulrich, lead guitarist Kirk Hammett and determinatively named producer Bob Rock hole up in a makeshift studio in the Presidio and set to relocating the old garage-band spark that gave birth to albums as seismic as Ride the Lightning and Master of Puppets.
That was the plan for 2003’s St Anger, anyway. It was not to be. Film-makers Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky were tasked with documenting the group’s comeback; shadowing Metallica as they wrote their first masterpiece of the new millennium, while also finding a replacement for Newsted. What they made was a candid, blissful portrait of a band beset with personal beef, wild hubris, limitless cash and absolutely zero good song ideas.
Superficially, Some Kind of Monster is a vérité dissection of the creative process in disarray. A good chunk of the film’s 2.5-hour runtime is spent observing the band grinding out the record’s turgid, down-tuned riffs, drums that famously sound like a bin being pushed down the stairs and heinous lyrics (“Temptation wreck my head! Temptation make you dead!” et al) in a state of palpable ennui. It’s fascinating seeing a former juggernaut of a band responsible for vintage rippers such as Creeping Death, One and Damage Inc (plus performances including this crackers 1991 show in Moscow) calcifying in real time.
But it’s mostly the fraught interpersonal relationships that make Some Kind of Monster such a lark. Specifically, two bickering narcissists – Hetfield and Ulrich – and a “performance enhancement coach” called Phil Towle, airlifted in to corral some semblance of harmony. Hetfield (stubborn, controlling, prone to door-slamming) and Ulrich (profane, lofty, woeful drummer) come across as uniformly awful. The omnipresent Towle, though, is a gem: relaying messages from deceased founding bassist Cliff Burton, penning boneheaded “mission statements” (“We come now to create our album of life / We honor the brilliance of each and harmony of ONE,” etc), and proffering his own terrible lyrics to the band’s new songs. When it comes to being fired – Hetfield concerned he sees himself as a fourth official member – the panicked hunger for his monthly $40,000 retainer could be seen from space.
The rest of the cast is more redeemable. Hammett is embattled and hippyish, clearly happier surfing and plodding around on his ranch in a giant stetson than mediating for his sniping bandmates (and who, to twist the knife, ban Hammett from playing his trademark solos as a concession to nu-metal’s anti-virtuosic stylings). Rock is sycophantic but steadying. Newsted seems mostly relieved to be free of the behemoth; new bassist Robert Trujillo adorably starstruck, the sequence of his rattling through turbo-speed 80s rager Battery a brief vision of modern-day Metallica at glorious full throttle.
Even away from Towle, levity abounds in the inadvertent Tap-esque hijinks that flow thick and fast. Take your pick: Hetfield lamenting: “I need a pen! None of this pencil shit!”, then noticing a roadie’s misspelling of “Mettlica” on his mic. Accidental Ulrich catchphrases (“It sounds stock to my ears!”). Hammett coaxing an ungodly racket out of his guitar with an electric nail buffer. And especially Ulrich’s wizened, sage-like father Torben’s damning reaction to hearing the album rushes for the first time: “If you said, ‘you were our adviser,’, I would say: ‘delete that.’” All gold, but there’s some occasional pathos, too: Hetfield may be an arse, but he’s consumed by alcoholism, abandonment issues and guilt over his parental shortcomings; while an overdue meeting between Ulrich and Megadeth’s Dave Mustaine, fired from Metallica in 1983, eschews the pop-psych jargon for some astute reflection on their dead friendship (and closes, poignantly, with Mustaine yelling “Metal up your ass!” in an old TV spot).
The film ends, more than 700 days in, with the album wrapped, Phil given the heave-ho, a promo video filmed at California’s terrifying San Quentin prison and absolutely no sense that the record is anything but a sopping wet squib (despite Ulrich deludedly declaring: “You can make something aggressive and fucked up with positive energy between the people creating it!”).
And while St Anger may be rubbish, Some Kind of Monster never fails to delight. For its lack of a redemptive arc, the cosmic schadenfreude, and a study of a group failing to navigate the grim musical landscape of the early 2000s, the film is my rainy-day staple. In any case, St Anger has sold 6m copies to date – so who’s laughing now, eh?
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Metallica: Some Kind of Monster is available to rent digitally
