Rockumentary 101

THAT BASTARD FORM the "rockumentary" -- half promo, half expose -- may have just reached a pinnacle. Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky's "Metallica: Some Kind of Monster," released this summer, is one of the best films ever made about a rock band.

The film deals, of course, with heavy metal. No other genre of rock music has the ludicrous scale of metal. In no other genre is the gap so great between the performer, that amplified mite, and the superstructure of noise, fantasy, and megabucks that teeters vastly over him. This gap is what the rockumentary is all about, and "Some Kind of Monster," which concerns the making of the last Metallica album, is a rockumentary for the ages.

The word "rockumentary" itself was coined in 1984's "This Is Spinal Tap," a work of such explosive parody it almost destroyed the genre altogether. Director Rob Reiner plays director/superfan Marty Di Bergi, earnest and respectful and finally deeply concerned in his huge-browed USS Coral Sea baseball hat, following with his camera crew the sinking fortunes of an English hard rock act, Spinal Tap, on its final tour of America. The band's friendships founder and their audiences disappear. Their equipment blows up. They are encountered in many moments of inelegance and ridiculousness. And so on.

The movie's satire was so potent as to be reality-altering; bands found themselves having "Spinal Tap moments" where previously none had existed. It is said of the Meat Puppets, one of Kurt Cobain's favorite bands, that when they first watched the film they wept tears, not of laughter, but of melancholy self-recognition.

Metallica have sold over 90 million records. They are credited with a total overhaul of heavy metal -- first stylistically, as they imported the pace and aggression of US hardcore punk into metal's precincts, and then commercially, as they became the biggest metal act on the planet. Pre-1991 they were speed-driven outsiders, making highly profitable raids on the mainstream from the thrash-metal fringe where they dwelt with Slayer, Anthrax, and Megadeth. They made gold records, but they wanted more -- they wanted in.

Playing stadiums and mega-festivals around the world, Metallica had learned that what truly moved the masses was not acceleration but a tremendous, mid-paced chug that seemed to compact the air above their heads. So for 1991's "Black Album" they slowed it down, located a colossal bottom end within their music, and -- with the help of producer Bob Rock, master of the cushioned downbeat -- plugged straight into the spine of rock'n'roll. The result was instant, global success, as if at the flick of a switch.

There was an irony to this. Spinal Tap's "Black Album" -- so named because someone forgot to do the cover art -- was their last, and so in a sense was Metallica's. They peaked; they became history. Releases since the "Black Album" have been less than convincing, retreads that make occasional, ungainly feints at novelty.

"Some Kind of Monster" opens in 2001 with the band at a very low ebb, becalmed in the studio, songless, irritable, passing the time with poisonously offhand digs at each other's musicianship. Lead guitarist Kirk Hammett observes lightly that frontman James Hetfield's guitar lines sound "stock." Hetfield mentions in passing to Lars Ulrich that his idea of a drummer is "someone who can keep a beat."

The band are ripening uncertainly into early middle age -- paunchy, soft-haired. Loyal producer Bob Rock, coiffed and plump in a comfy sweater, looks like somebody's mother. Jason Newsted, the bassist, has just quit, Hetfield (unknown to his bandmates) is contemplating the trip to rehab that will remove him from recording for over a year, and humming around Metallica is the insistent pressure, the insectival clamor, of the "squillions of dollars" riding on their next move. To help them endure one another's company a full-time therapist, or "performance coach" is hired -- they bring in a shrink.

. . .

Berlinger and Sinofsky, who originally signed on to make a short promotional film, must have been high-fiving each other behind their cameras. To see these roadhogs, these worldshakers made mute by a pop psychologist in ugly shorts -- to catch them in their lamest human dimension -- this is the very essence of rockumentary.

Think of Bob Dylan, in his dressing room, acting snotty with a cub reporter in DA Pennebaker's "Don't Look Back" (1967); Mick Jagger at Altamont in the Maysles brothers' "Gimme Shelter" (1970), looking out at a crowd convulsed by violence and fear and limply urging, "My babies. . . Brothers and sisters. . . We all want to have a good time, don't we?"; Paul McCartney and George Harrison arguing over a guitar part in "Let It Be" (1970) -- sotto voce, with smothered intensity, like parents who know their children are listening.

"This Is Spinal Tap" plays the bathos for laughs; in "Gimme Shelter" it is deadly. Altamont was a disaster, with a disaster's combination of reality and nightmare. The Rolling Stones' decision to hire the Hell's Angels to provide security for a free festival at the Altamont Speedway, near San Francisco, was a specific error, but the day's events -- as recorded by the Maysles -- seem to have an almost mythic momentum. Very early on, the vibe kinks and plummets -- heads in the crowd keep turning, as at the silent circulation of bad news -- and by nightfall the situation is well out of hand; the hippies are rattled, having bad trips, the Hell's Angels scowling and defensive, circling their bikes. At this point there is nothing the Stones can do, and the film moves inexorably toward the moment during the Stones' set when the Angels stab a young black man to death.

The beauty of "Gimme Shelter," however, is that it takes simultaneous readings from two different orders of existence. On the ground, the Stones are a silly, strutting rock band caught in a bad situation; on the mythic plane, they are exposed as insufficient shamans, capable of summoning darkness but not of controlling it. They play "Sympathy for the Devil," but then -- sensing the atmosphere -- back off into a noodling, hapless version of "Under My Thumb," during which the killing occurs. People scatter. The Stones abort their set, and with darkness roiling behind them these meek millionaires tread palely towards their helicopter and are whirled aloft to safety.

In the 1980s, as America's musical genius went underground into punk-rock Hades, the camera followed it. Here things were inverted: In rockumentary road movies like "Another State of Mind" and "Reality 86'ed" it was ordinary life, not the band, that looked bizarre and in need of correction.

"Another State of Mind" follows a 1983 cross-country tour by Social Distortion and Youth of Today. Town after town sees the young musicians, hair-dyed idealists, stagger dazedly out of their van and blink and yawn and peer in horror at the stolidness of normality. They sit down in a diner and the police are called. By 1986, when Dave Markey filmed the final Black Flag tour for his "Reality 86'ed," the mood had hardened: "The more I see of this country, the more I think the world should be destroyed," comments one roadie.

. . .

Metallica have always been about 10 percent punk rock, but the truest forebear of "Some Kind of Monster" is "Let It Be," in which the Beatles come together in a converted film studio to rehearse what turned out to be their final album.

The Fab Four, incomparably, were always Themselves, and it takes only a few inches of celluloid for director Michael Lindsay-Hogg to receive a strong psychic imprint from each of them: John Lennon is gaunt, withdrawn, somber, Yoko-centric (she haunts the sessions without a word, as if making a private art-statement); McCartney saunters in with a full beard and a child at his feet, a sleek and cheerful family man; Harrison is watchful, poised; and as usual, Ringo Starr awaits his orders, either clowning or looking martyred by ennui.

It's immediately obvious that Lennon's had enough, and that everyone knows it. McCartney, on the other hand, is full of beans. His permanent good mood is his gift to the world -- no one has written more songs about being happy than Paul McCartney -- but in the unheated Twickenham studio his buoyancy seems off-key. He does an impromptu, eruptively high-spirited bossa nova version of "Long and Winding Road," and one senses what Ringo called his "Beatleaholism," the coercive bounciness that so annoyed his bandmates.

Having upset Harrison by calling his guitar work "complicated," McCartney attempts to soothe him: "Look, I'm trying to help you, but you always end up getting so annoyed. . .. You're doing it again! I'm not trying to get you. I'm just trying to say, look, lad -- the band -- you know?"

"I don't mind," Harrison dourly rejoins, going ultra-Liverpudlian. "I'll play whatever you want. I won't play anything at all if you don't want me to."

Both "Let It Be" and "Some Kind of Monster" find their final resolving chord in live performance. Here, after all, is where the troublesome laws of life -- change, perishability, the complications of experience -- are briefly repealed, and rock'n'roll has its moment. Here is where rockumentary stops. (Pure concert movies -- of which Martin Scorsese's 1978 "The Last Waltz," about The Band's final show, is the exemplar -- are always acts of worship.)

Onto the roof of the Apple building at No. 3 Savile Row, the Beatles -- resplendent in furs, beards, long hair, the full flower of late Beatlehood -- emerge with wary grins to give their last show, up where the pigeons are. It's low-key, extraordinary. Ringo, battling roof-gusts, tries to light himself a cigarette. Lennon looks cheerful for the first time. And as midday office workers peer up from the street below, "Get Back" redounds through the smutty chasms of London's West End.

"Some Kind of Monster," true to the scale of heavy metal, ends seconds before the first show of Metallica's current world tour -- the band are group-hugging it backstage, healed, saved, excited, while the gorgeous strains of Ennio Morricone's "Ecstasy of Gold" (their prerecorded intro) travel across a stadium full of seethingly expectant, ready-to-go metalheads.

Metallica are back. The ringing, invisible superstructure towers above them, thronged with the hopes of their fans and accountants. They are reentering the dream of their music.

James Parker, the author of "Turned On: A Biography of Henry Rollins," is a writer living in Brookline.