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SXSW capsule review: ‘Anvil! The Story of Anvil’
Back in the hair-lashing, riff-crunching heyday of ’80s heavy metal, Anvil was a rising force of anthemic noise and comically lewd antics. The group’s snaggle-toothed frontman called himself Lips and played his V-shaped guitar like a perverse love object.
From its Toronto base, Anvil had plans for world domination and almost pulled it off. But, after pioneering the thrash-metal movement and influencing upcoming rock giants Metallica and Slayer, Anvil vanished into obscurity.
“Everybody ripped them off and left them for dead,” says former Guns N’ Roses guitarist Slash in this oddly touching and enormously entertaining documentary about Anvil’s current comeback attempt. Directed by Sacha Gervasi, an old friend of the bandmates (and now an accomplished Hollywood screenwriter), “The Story of Anvil” catches up with Lips and original drummer Robb Reiner, who formed Anvil as teenagers in 1973.
Almost 40 years later, now well into their jowly 50s, their hunger for hard-rock glory remains unquenched. Instead of sports stadiums, though, Anvil plays sports bars. Lips and Reiner’s impossible dream to reclaim the metal-god mantle is the drama throbbing through the film.
Passion, perseverance, rejection, humiliation, frustration — these are the age-old themes of the struggling artist, and the movie explores them with unflinching honesty. It shows how exhaustingly difficult it is to get noticed in a youth-oriented music industry whose entire business model has changed. And it shares the squabbles sparked when egos clash in a creative fever, recalling the fiery band in-fighting seen in the 2004 Metallica documentary “Some Kind of Monster.”
While this invites our empathy, the movie is also extremely funny, filled with inadvertent “Spinal Tap” moments that make you laugh and love the characters even more. Lips and Reiner endear because they operate in a bubble in which time and good sense have stopped. Their optimism veers on boyish naivete, and they almost infect us with their quixotic hopes. Says Lips: “It can only get better.”
Screening: 10 p.m. Sunday, Alamo South; 9 p.m. Wednesday, Alamo Ritz.
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