The next in our series of writers celebrating their most rewatched comfort films is an ode to the scrappy 2004 music documentary
T
he 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.
