Anvil! The Story of Anvil

Unless you were a regular reader of heavy metal magazine 'Kerrang!' in the early 1980s you've probably never heard of Anvil, which, 25 years after their heyday, would put you firmly in the majority. To recap, Anvil were a briefly feted Canadian four-piece whose frontman Lips played his guitar with a dildo while grinding out songs called 'Metal On Metal' and 'March Of The Crabs'. For a while it looked as if they might take their place alongside Metallica and Slayer in the pantheon of metal gods. Then something happened - or rather, it didn't. Anvil made three well-received albums. Then they made nine more. But outside a dwindling fanbase in their native Toronto, the world was no longer listening.

Director and fan Sacha Gervasi, who worked for the band as a roadie in the 1980s and subsequently co-wrote Steven Spielberg's The Terminal, catches original members Steve 'Lips' Kudlow and drummer Robb Reiner, now in their fifties and weighed down by ordinary life, as they struggle, strive and hustle for one more shot at stardom. It's a brilliantly assembled documentary - or if you will, rockumentary - about maintaining a dream in the face of impossible odds, about toiling in rock 'n' roll's trenches, about friendship, loyalty and obsession, and about the absurd yet potent pull of heavy metal itself - that fundamentalist wing of rock music from which no devotee ever quite escapes.

Back then Lips wore bondage braces and supported Bon Jovi. Now he's a driver delivering school dinners. It's never quite clear what drummer Reiner does. Their wives and families are supportive yet weary of the boys' inability to walk away from the past. Likewise the band's dreams for the future. Then comes a hopelessly disorganised European tour managed by a woman who barely speaks any English. The venture climaxes with a fight after an unpaid gig in Prague and the band slinking back to Toronto where there's no money, no plan, no interest and, it appears, precious little point.

By an odd coincidence Anvil's drummer Reiner shares his name with the director of This Is Spinal Tap, and though there are no explicit references to that film - with the possible exception of a quick trip to Stone'enge - it's the elephant in Gervasi's documentary.

Tufnel and St Hubbins, you'll recall, were Tap's own fire and ice. So it is with Lips and Reiner - a bickering couple whose dysfunctional co-dependence no screenwriter could credibly make up. Lips is the showman with his heart on his sleeve, manfully attempting a job in telesales if it means raising cash for the band. Reiner is a gloomy, slightly blitzed enigma whose basement walls are lined with his own (actually quite good) Edward Hopper-inspired paintings, as well as a sizeable portrait of a poo.

Eventually the band settle on a course of action: to record their thirteenth album, helpfully titled 'This Is Thirteen', with British producer Chris Tsangarides, the man who helped forge Anvil's early success. There's just one problem - they need to raise 12 grand to do it. And then there's just one more. No record company wants to release it.

To borrow a phrase from elsewhere, if Anvil didn't have bad luck, they would have no luck at all, but it's the endless catalogue of cock-ups and calamities which enables Gervasi to capture Lips' unquenchable optimism, quiet decency and none-more-metal determination never to surrender. There have clearly been sacrifices within the Kudlow household, but Lips retains a teenage passion for anything that goes to 11 and there's something sweetly poignant about his puppy-eyed encounter at a festival with the grizzled heroes of his youth, who respond to Lips' boundless enthusiasm with faintly embarrassed bemusement.

Like Metallica's Some Kind Of Monster, Anvil themselves are clearly complicit in all this and it's tempting to regard Gervasi's film not merely as an elaborate promo for a song, or an album, or a band - though it is all of those things - but as encouragement to an entire generation of ageing, ailing rockers declining to go quietly into the night. Since heavy metal is rock's own fantasy realm it's only right that the film's resolution, whether real or slyly orchestrated, is an example of pure wish-fulfilment. Eventually Anvil get what they deserve. It's a genuinely uplifting finale to this feelgood fable about life for rock 'n' roll's footsoldiers. "The music never ends," says Lips, philosophical to the end. "Neither does the debt."