Documentaries about musicians gravitate towards dysfunction, because that’s how you get drama into documentaries and most musicians — especially in bands, where too much time spent together yields unnatural tensions — seem to be pretty dramatic anyway. So it’s curious that both Anvil!: The Story Of Anvil and Iron Maiden: Flight 666 played at SXSW, because they’re about as diametrically opposed as movies about metal bands that’ve lasted over 30 years could be. They’re both love letters, but one has to convince the audience to care; the other is pre-sold.
As for which is better, that’d be Anvil. This is made out of love as much as any sense of “what a story”; the last shot (a post-credits photo of director Sacha Gervasi as 1985’s best-coiffed teen metalhead with his then-favorite band) confirms that it’s a gift from a former teen fan, when music matters most. In the early ’80s Anvil was on track to join Metallica and Anthrax in the upper echelons of commercial success; their hit “Metal on Metal” led to them playing alongside Bon Jovi in 1984 in Japan. But something stopped them, and though Slash, Lemmy, Scott Ian and Lars Ulrich all turn up at the start to testify to Anvil’s lasting importance to metal, none of them have any clue what happened to them or why.
