Anvil! The Story of Anvil (2008)
You cannot watch Anvil! The Story of Anvil without This Is Spinal Tap playing somewhere in the back of your mind. I don't mean that as a backhanded compliment or a cheap joke. It's just that the parallels are so striking, so eerie, that you'd be lying if you claimed the thought never crossed your. The ageing rockers still grinding away, the disastrous European tour, the bickering and the reconciling, and, I promise you, a drummer genuinely called Robb Reiner. You couldn't write it. Except, of course, Rob Reiner already did, more or less, and his was fiction.
The difference here, and it is a very large one, is that these men are entirely real. Sacha Gervasi's documentary tells the story of Anvil, a Canadian heavy metal band who, in the early eighties, were standing shoulder to shoulder with the acts that would go on to dominate the world. Metallica, Slayer, Anthrax. Bands who cite Anvil as an influence, and mean it. And then those bands became legends while Anvil quietly faded, slipping out of the conversation so completely that most people have never heard of them.
What makes the film such a curious, oddly affecting watch is that the ability was plainly there. Their music is genuinely good, which is the strange, faintly heartbreaking part of it all. By their own account, and backed up by people with no reason to flatter them, it was rotten luck and spectacularly poor management rather than any shortage of talent that kept them off the big stage. Gervasi supplements the band's own story with interviews from Lemmy and Lars Ulrich, true royalty of the genre, who speak about Anvil with real warmth and genuine respect. That's not nothing. That counts for something. It just didn't count for record sales.
Decades on, the two men at the heart of it all, Lips and Robb, are still at it. Still rehearsing, still recording, still chasing a dream the world stopped rewarding a very long time ago. And they're still, touchingly, the closest of friends. That friendship is where the film finds its emotional centre. You watch these two middle-aged men, working day jobs and coming home to their guitars, and you feel for them in a way that sneaks up on you. It's not pity exactly. It's something closer to recognition, that feeling of watching someone refuse to let go of the thing that makes them who they are, even when everything around them is saying it's time.
As a piece of film-making, it's decent rather than remarkable. It carries a slightly rough texture that sits somewhere between documentary and mockumentary, and it never quite transcends its subject the way the very best music documentaries manage to. It doesn't have the formal ambition of something like Koyaanisqatsi (1982), obviously, but even measured against more conventional music docs it stays a little too close to the surface. Gervasi is clearly fond of his subjects, perhaps too fond to push harder.
But the story lodges in you regardless. Because this is less a film about heavy metal than it is about friendship, persistence, and the cruelly thin line between the legends and the also-rans. What separates Anvil from Metallica? Luck, mostly. Timing. The right person hearing the right song on the right day. It's an uncomfortable thought, and the film is at its best when it sits with that discomfort rather than rushing past it towards a redemptive conclusion.
Three stars. A likeable, bittersweet film, and well worth ninety minutes of your time, particularly if you've ever backed something that never quite came good.
Rating: ★★★ | Year: 2008 | Watched: 2026-08-20
Where to watch
Watch in the UK
Physical: Amazon UK · Zavvi
Watch in the US
Stream: Amazon Prime Video · Amazon Prime Video with Ads
Rent: Amazon Video · Apple TV Store · Fandango At Home
Buy: Amazon Video · Apple TV Store · Fandango At Home
Physical: Amazon US
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