Reviews: Anvil: The Story of Anvil (4/5); American Teen (3/5)

Anvil! The Story of Anvil
(Sacha Gervasi):
Steve ‘Lips’ Kudlow, Robb Reiner
Running time: 80 minutes (15A)

This touching documentary is a story of failure – the downward slump of Canadian heavy metal band Anvil. They pioneered thrash metal in the early 1980s, tasted brief fame, but dived soon after into obscurity. The band’s now middle-aged core, singer Steve ‘Lips’ Kudlow and drummer Robb Reiner, however, refuse to die. The set-up is real-life Spinal Tap: the denial of reality, the child-man personalities and a redemption of sorts in Japan. Yet you watch Anvil and instead of laughing at them, you feel for them. They’re deluded men who refuse to grow up. But there is something admirable in their tenacity of spirit and the way they refuse to be ordinary. (They are terribly ordinary: ‘Lips’ delivers canteen food for a living.) Gervasi, who wrote Steven Spielberg’s The Terminal, lovingly steers the story towards a bittersweet conclusion. The film won the audience award at its European premiere at last year’s Galway Film Fleadh, and another audience award at the Dublin International Film Festival. The sad irony is that it gives Anvil the fame they crave – they are now famous for not being famous.

American Teen
(Amanda Burstein):
Hannah Bailey, Colin Clemens, Mitch Reinholt, Megan Krizmanich
Running time: 100 minutes (15A)

Hollywood high-school movies are stocked with clichés: the bitchy blonde, the jackass jock and the wretched nerd. Amanda Burstein’s documentary American Teen finds their real-life equivalents at a redbelt Indiana high school and digs beneath the stereotypes. Over the course of their final school year, she roams the social maze of adolescence with a certain degree of fly-on-the-wall. It’s full of bitchiness, bullying and backstabbing. The nerd finally gets a girlfriend but she cheats on him on camera. One female student emails a photo of her breasts to a boy, only for it to find its way around school. Amusingly, the kids are self-aware: the nerd knows he’s a nerd to the point of self-fulfilling prophecy. The princess blonde has a laugh about “materialistic girls”. I don’t doubt the film is honest, though its claims as cine verité are at times suspect: One alienated student gets depressed and Burnstein films her staring forlornly into the distance from cinematic locations. The Maysles brothers would have had none of that.