I’ve watched this twice now and, like just about everyone else, I can’t get enough of it. It didn’t hurt that I came to it at just the right time for myself and it really lifted me in a way I could never have seen coming. I am by no means a fan of metal music – in fact, I plain don’t listen to it at all (aside from a few exceptions in my currently listening my way through Rolling Stone magazine’s top 500 albums list) and despite my love of this movie will likely never listen to the albums of Anvil. But the music – their specific music, at least – isn’t what this movie is about at all. What the movie is about is What Really Matters.

On one level, Anvil is like another Spinal Tap. It has moments the stretch one’s belief to breaking point, moments that are laugh out loud funny. The difference of course, is that Anvil are real. This movie is about real people who had 15 minutes of fame – who worked with the greats who are still making a career of music, yet who themselves are now constantly back at square one where a career in music is just a dream supported by almost embarrassingly menial day jobs (the scenes where we see them at “real” work reminded me horribly of Mickey Rourke in The Wrestler).

We follow them on a disastrously organised European tour where they play to half empty rooms, where venues refuse to pay them, where transport isn’t even correctly arranged, witness them being given the runaround by a record company but most importantly we see them never giving up. These guys simply enjoy, as one of them puts it early on, making the Anvil sound, creating the music even if sometimes the only audience might be themselves. Whether you care about this particular music or not, what can’t be denied is that this band is the rare kind that understands what music should be when all the business and fame of it is stripped away. This is what I’m talking about when I say it caught me at a particularly right time. If – like me – you too, like Anvil, look to the future with the thought that one day music (or even any artistic endeavour) is what you’ll “do” … drop everything now and see this movie because it will remind you why, and more importantly that when it comes down to it, you don’t have to look forward to some ideal. Just make your music. Its a beautiful message that is all the more powerful so starkly contrasted with the style of music these guys make (not to mention the way they, not to mention their fans, look!)

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