Movie Review : Metal Lords (2022)
Mike Tyson once said about boxing: "No one in their right mind does this." His observation is so concise, brilliant and true that it applies more or less to anything extreme including heavy metal music. By design, it’s an iconoclast genre that rejects common cultural trends that everyone seems to like coming-of-age movies, for example. I fucking hate them in general and it’s normal reaction, because part of metalhead identity is hinged on rejecting normal shit. But Peter Sollett and D.B Weiss' Metal Lords kind of works?
Maybe I’m just getting soft, but hear me out and I’ll let you decide.
Metal Lords is a weird coming-of-age movie featuring two best friends named Hunter Sylvester (Adrian Greensmith) and Kevin Schlieb (Jaeden Martell), who are planning to start a metal band together. Well, Hunter is and he’s more or less forcing Kevin to transition from marching band drum to becoming a full-blown metal drummer. Kevin follows his best friend along because Hunter’s been the only one taking his interest at heart for so long and quickly realizes his newly acquired skill makes him quite popular.
The psychology of metal
The two protagonists of Metal Lords want very different things: Kevin wants to be desired and appreciated by his classmates and Hunter wants to become a metal god. Now, the former would normally be the relatable one and the latter would be the excessive jerkoff who needs to be taught a lesson. But Metal Lords doesn’t work like this. By giving Kevin the purpose of becoming a metal drummer, Hunter also provides him with a distinct identity. Kevin is not a nobody anymore. He’s a guy with a valuable skill.
Heavy Metal is all over Metal Lords and metalheads will have a blast with the easter eggs, but music is ultimately only a metaphor for D.B Weiss. It’s a mean of internal validation. Pursuing music excellence is a way to craft your self-esteem at a vulnerable age, because it’s a something you can control. If you’re good at playing your instrument, you’re good at playing your instrument and chances are you also enjoy the shit out of playing it. Validation from others is the byproduct from kicking ass at what you do.
So, Hunter is really the good guy in this movie. He doesn’t act like a conventional mentor figure and I don’t believe that he understand it’s what he is, but his quest for excellence coupled with his genuine affection for Kevin save his friend from becoming a high school dweeb. This is what makes Metal Lords such a fun and different coming-of-age movie. Sometimes in life you don’t learn things from people who are explicitly trying to teach you. You learn things by living through some shit with people who love you.
Is Metal Lords going to make metalheads piss razors?
Hell yeah and who cares? Metalheads take themselves extremely seriously and this movie doesn’t. It takes its topics extremely seriously (high school and metal), but it’s also meant to make people laugh and have a good time. It doesn’t try to be high art by any means. It doesn’t even try to be one of these raunchy late nineties high school comedy. Metal Lords is discreetly wiggling itself between labels, like a high school outsider that doesn’t quite fit with any group. It’s doing its own thing.
Sure, the band’s song Machinery of Torment sounds like watered-down Metallica and Hunter and Kevin are into pretty basic bands, but this is how every metalhead kid that age is. You discover the shit your parents or older cousins liked first and then you seek your own extremes. If Peter Sollett and D.B Weiss picked metal in order to make their point, it’s not because it’s popular by any means anyway. It’s because there’s a strong sense of identity associated with this music. It inspires and empowers outsiders to rebel against reality.
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I’ll probably forget Metal Lords ever existed within two years, but I had a good time with it and I believe it’s by design. It’s a quiet and heartfelt comedy about the inherent power of taking your life seriously and dedicating yourself to something. It could’ve been about skateboarding or competitive hot dog eating instead of metal and it would’ve been essentially the same movie. In the parlance of Kevin Smith, it’s "just a movie". Something you’d rent at the video store…. and I kind of miss video stores. Don't you?
