Photo Courtesy Sundance Film Festival

While his friends spent record time with The Pistols and The Clash, teenage Sacha Gervasi scoured Sounds Magazine for upcoming metal talent. In 1982 he'd stumble on a band that hit marks of innovation potent enough to influence the entire style's movement. Frontrunners of speed metal Anvil raged into London fresh off recording Metal on Metal, and thanks to a streak of moxy, Gervasi slipping backstage, he'd meet lead singer Steve 'Lips' Kudlow and drummer Robb Reiner. Showing the band around the city later and then spending a few summer months touring with them in North America, Gervasi would get a singular roadie's view of the Anvil life.

It wasn't until twenty years later, however, that now screenwriter Gervasi tracked down Kudlow and Reiner and began work on his hysterical, sad as a rock ballad doc Anvil! The Story of Anvil. Likened to a real life This Is Spinal Tape and easily carrying as much humor, Anvil! explores the lengths that people go to in order to create what they love. It's a socially rebellious, in-your-face, harrowing, discouraging, inspiring, ever-idealistic--and not to diminish any of its hard-edged caliber-- touching film.

In sharp contrast to his dildo-brandishing days of metal yore, father-husband Kudlow now works delivering food trays to children's schools. Still dreaming about success with his music in his spare time, he continues to play with Anvil, his best friend and band co-founder Reiner still at his side. As much a story about making music as about this lifelong friendship, doc shares alternately comical and tender scenes of overblown argument between the two, and at times cinematographer Chris Soos is so close to the volatility the emotions feels dumped right into the theater.

Gervasi and editors Jeff Renfroe and Andrew Dickler work exquisitely together to create meaningful emotional and punchline driven beats, especially as an unsuccessful European tour and lack of success in finding a record label for new album This Is Thirteen lands Anvil in a desperate situation of creative humbug. Gervasi, Renfroe and Dickler's best work, however, showcases the doc's much-deserved, not entirely triumphant but pretty darn exhilarating ending.

What was once solely Gervasi's memory becomes here a sweet and sad glimpse of music making lives that tried--and in fact, still try--to make it, although the impression left behind as the last frame fades is that the lives themselves, not just the records, are the greatest testaments to the music in the end.

For more information on the film visit www.anvilthemovie.com..