Metallica in Therapy

By Cynthia Fuchs, PopMatters. Posted July 16, 2004.

Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky could hardly have known what they were in for when they set out to make a movie about Metallica. Though they had brief contact with the band previously (in securing permission to use some music for their film, Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills), this time, the mighty rockers' label was paying the directors to document the recording of an album.

That album was "St. Anger," and it took nearly three years to make.

When Berlinger and Sinofsky arrived, the band was recuperating from the departure of longtime bassist Jason Newsted, who finally had enough of the group's perennial "creative disputes" and ongoing arguments between vocalist James Hetfield and drummer Lars Ulrich. After 90 million records sold and more 20 years spent on the road and in studios, the hard-living pair appeared increasingly unable to collaborate, with guitarist Kirk Hammett's efforts at appeasement falling by the wayside. Their company, Q-Prime, decided to take drastic action, and hired "therapist/performance enhancement expert" Phil Towle (for $40,000 a month) to bring the boys back into some state resembling working order. Metallica, intones Towle, "needed to take a look at itself."

The film begins at the end of the process, with the band promoting the new record, acting almost as if it's like any other. Asked to describe "the span of his career" in one word, Hetfield is stumped and bored. The point is cut to emphasize how answering such inane questions, again and again, can become tedious, depressing, and daunting. At this point, Metallica: Some Kind of Monster turns the page, back to the moments when the album, Metallica's first studio project in seven years, looked like it wouldn't ever be completed.

Initially, Newsted's exit sends Metallica into something of an emotional, even existential, tailspin. In an effort to calm themselves, they bring on producer Bob Rock to play bass for the record, and set up a studio at the Presidio, apparently perceived as a restorative environment. Hetfield appears in his expensive sports car: "I really like going fast," he testifies. No kidding. The film repeats biographical information that will be old news for the band's fans. Since their inception in the Bay Area in 1982, the band notoriously careened from disaster to disaster, including the 1985 death of first bass player Cliff Burton. With ups and downs made incessantly public, they have endured a raucous blur of substance-abusing (they were once called "Alcoholica"), infighting, and raging at various external targets (their noisy campaign against Napster, in which Ulrich became most vocal, earned them a dubious distinction, as the "band most hated by their own fans").

As the sessions with Towle begin, the film patches together old concert footage and the Presidio rehearsal sessions, soon skidding to a kind of stop when Hetfield begins rolling his eyes at Towle's sketchy New Agey speak; when he asks if they can "sack" him, Ulrich says no, "the Phil stuff is important," an "investment in the music." Soon after, Hetfield removes himself to rehab (a stint that will last over a year), whereupon the filmmakers, band members, and management decide to pursue the project anyway. It's transformed into something else, a weird therapeutic exposé, partly self-defensive, partly confessional, and largely performative (it's no secret at any point that cameras are rolling).

Cynthia Fuchs is the Film and Television Editor at PopMatters.

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