Anvil! The Story Of Anvil

Rock is surely no place for a 50-year-old school-dinner delivery guy. Even a 50-year-old school-dinner delivery guy whose band have evolved not a jot since they were on the same bill as Bon Jovi in a frenzy of adulation in Japan 25 years ago.
Anvil were ‘on the cusp of greatness’ and ‘destined for success’ at one point, idolised by their peers (particularly the drummer, Robb Reiner, who was, at one time, apparently considered the best metal drummer in the world by Lars Ulrich amongst others) and riding a metal wave that launched a whole slew of bands. Everyone, it seems, but them. What went wrong?
The film doesn’t really answer that, and it’s not something you’ll be too worried about discovering whilst watching: you will, assuredly, simply want them to have any kind of recognition, if only for the 30-year slog of a career that has left singer ‘Lipps’ looking like a 60-year-old crack bum and mooching drummer Reiner in therapy, trudging after his frontman to whatever’s next, if anything.
We get the lowdown on Lipps’ job (‘some days we get pizza then the next day shepherds pie, then maybe they’ll flip it and we’ll get shepherds pie then pizza’) and we get the point: this sucks compared to mugging away to an endless throng of mad Japanese metalheads. PATHOS, DUDE! We get Reiner, wearing the kind of expression you might otherwise find on the face of an orphan peering through an archetypal family window on Christmas Day, showing us his ‘hideaway’ and his Hopper-mimicking paintings. DEEP, DUDE! Both are extremely likeable guys, remarkably sane considering their misfortune and admirably bereft of the kind of bitterness and regret that would surely be considered fair.
We get the mad girlfriend-of-the-bassist promoter, who doesn’t do the best job leading them across Europe to various sticky-floored, ill-populated shitholes - on one hilarious occasion to play for an enormous headbanger on an armchair. We get the skint reality of them trying, with zilch capital, to pay for the new album with the producer of their only well-recorded stuff, a nostalgic, chubby opportunist who has an amp that goes up to 11 and is strangely redolent of Jonathan King (big sis’ stumps up the cash. FAMILY, DUDE!).
In the end, we’re with this pretty hopeless band of crazies trying to revisit past glories all the way. And it all ends up fairly awesome.