Some Kind of Monster

DIRECTED BY Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky
STARRING James Hetfield, Lars Ulrich, Kirt Hammett, Bob Rock, and Dave Mustaine
Paramount


If rock stars have learned anything over the past couple of years, it should be to run like hell whenever they see a camera crew coming their way. Being the subject of a documentary is, for bands, the media equivalent of breaking a mirror while standing under a ladder as a pack of black cats cross their path. In the course of being filmed for the movie Dig!, Brian Jonestown Massacre frontman Anton Newcombe became a full-bore junkie. Meanwhile, graveyards are filling up with members of the Ramones who have died since shooting started on last year’s band doc, End of the Century.

No one in Metallica actually died while they were being filmed for Some Kind of Monster, the movie that traces the making of 2003’s St. Anger CD. But that’s about the only bad thing not to have occurred. As the movie opens, relations between James Hetfield and Lars Ulrich have become so grim they recruit a “performance-enhancement coach” to act as band therapist. But with the headshrinkery only just begun, Hetfield decamps to rehab before finally returning on the condition that they rehearse for only four hours a day, partly because he wants to attend his daughter’s ballet class. (One can only assume this is the frontman’s karmic penance for missing his son’s first birthday to shoot bears and guzzle vodka in Russia.)

Elsewhere, Ulrich decides to pick a disastrous fight with Napster and then drunkenly watches his considerable art collection being auctioned off at Christie’s, leaving guitarist Kirk “I try to be an example of egolessness” Hammett to do an unintentional but quite brilliant impersonation of Spinal Tap’s hapless peacemaker Derek Smalls.

Whether you regard all this as the behavior of loveable metal self-improvers or repellent egomaniacal asswipes probably depends on what you thought of the band in the first place. But the end product is, either way, huge fun for the viewer — and infinitely more pleasurable than the album they finally ended up recording.