[Anvil rocks Japan, above.] 

First, a confession: in 1990, when I was thirteen years old, I played the bass in a thrash metal band. Yes, yours truly. We lived in a small, boring town in the foothills of the Santa Cruz mountains, where there was little to do apart from hang out in one anothers’ houses and listen to music. Our music was metal; so we started a band and promised to rock together forever. Of course we weren’t that talented, didn’t go far, and soon went our separate ways.

Which was probably a good thing, considering the fate of Anvil, a Canadian metal band formed (like so many great bands) by two kids with strong personalities: Steve “Lips” Kudlow and Robb Reiner — no relation to his more-famous namesake, the director of This is Spinal Tap, though given the parallels, the coincidence is staggering.

When Kudlow and Reiner started their band in 1973, they were thirteen years old, and also made the classic vow to rock together forever. The extraordinary thing is that they’ve kept the vow for more than thirty-five years, despite crushing setbacks that really should have broken them up decades ago.

This tenacity can be partly explained as the product of huge early successes that seemed to promise them a great career as a marquee metal band. In the early 1980s, Anvil toured in Japan with the likes of Scorpions and Bon Jovi, and played before audiences of tens of thousands. According to rock luminaries Lars Ulrich (Metallica), Scott Ian (Anthrax), Slash (Guns N’ Roses), and Lemmy (Motorhead), their 1982 album Metal on Metal influenced an entire generation of rock musicians. Once you’ve had that kind of success, it can be hard to go back to civilian life.

But then something happened, and they were forced back into it: instead of going on to international fame and fortune, they faded into the background, and few among their admirers is quite sure why. (Clearly at a loss, Ulrich speculates, “maybe it was the Canadian thing?”) But one of the great sound engineers of metal, Chris Tsangarides, gives a solid diagnosis late in the film: bad luck with management, labels, and poor production values on most of their albums led to the erosion of their fan base to a tiny hard core.

Despite these setbacks, Kudlow and Reiner have  kept the group together, not least because their will to hold on has a lot to do with their relationship. Essentially, after thirty years of working together, they are tight as family: when they argue, it turns into the spectacular kind of blow-up that leaves everybody in tears and professing love for one another. Not to mention the music.

It’s a good thing they have that love, because up until now they’ve had little else going for them. At the beginning, Kudlow and Reiner have fallen very far indeed. Two of the band members left long ago for greener pastures (to be replaced by talented superfans who are thrilled to be in the band), Kudlow works a job delivering food to school cafeterias in the icy Ontario mornings, and Reiner, appropriately enough for a metal drummer, operates a jackhammer of some sort. When the opportunity arises to do a European tour, they seize it even though the idea makes no sense (a tour? for what fans?) and it will eventually prove a total fiasco.

But back at home, the ever-optimistic Kudlow counts his blessings, pointing out that although everything went wrong, at least there was a tour for everything to go wrong on! And he decides that the time has come to get an album produced correctly once and for all, and give them one last shot at fame. He sends a demo tape off to the aforementioned producer, and what follows, including a tour in Japan, almost too neat a counterbalance to their 1984 tour, that promises to turn their career around once and for all. 

Exactly what happens on that tour, you’ll have to see for yourself: the wait to discover their ultimate fate was pleasurably suspenseful; but it won’t ruin anything to say that the ending was much more positive than I dared to hope for.

In the end, Anvil! is a film about practicing an art for the love of it, and not for the possible rewards; but given that you probably didn’t care much about the fate of this obscure Canadian heavy metal band when you entered the theater, you’ll be surprised by how satisfying it is when some of those rewards finally do come their way.

Film opens Friday night at the Bridge Theater on Geary; director Sacha Gervasi will appear in person that night. Tix and more info here.