Metallica has always been a headbanger band. Now a new documentary, “Metallica Saved My Life,” makes a case for the heavy metal icons as headshrinkers as well.
The film, which will have its West Coast premiere at the Mill Valley Film Festival next month, focuses on fans from around the world who embrace Metallica’s hard rock anthems and bombastic concerts as a kind of group therapy, an adrenaline-fueled communal experience that gives many of them a reason to live.
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That’s certainly the case for one young woman in the film who freaked out her family by skipping college to follow the band on tour.
“This is more important than getting a degree,” she said. “This is more important than my own existence right now. I’m going to kill myself if I don’t go.”
Another super fan, who proudly displays his Metallica-themed tattoos, talked about being so depressed as a teenager that only discovering Metallica saved him from suicide. He said he felt as if the band’s front man and co-founder, guitarist and lead singer James Hetfield, who has been open about his own mental health struggles, was speaking to him directly through the song “Fade to Black,” which addresses suicidal feelings of hopelessness and despair.
“The more I use him as therapy, the stronger the connection gets,” he said. “He’s been helping me get through a lot for many years. I think if it wasn’t for Metallica, I wouldn’t be here right now.”
A young woman had a similar experience during one life-changing show for her. She felt Hetfield was singing to her and her alone as she stood in her usual place in the front row, called “the rail.”
“That was probably the most meaningful moment of my life,” she said. “It makes you want to live.”
Hetfield reportedly credits former “Saturday Night Live” comedian Jim Breuer, a friend of the band, with the idea for the documentary.
“’James, you have got to hear these fricking stories,’” he said. “’They’re unbelievable.’”
Many of them are pretty incredible, to be sure, and Swedish director Jonas Akerlund roamed the globe, essentially from pole to pole, in search of them.
In the documentary, he travels with the band to the Arctic Circle and the tiny town of Tuktoyaktuk, aka Tuk, where many of its 900 residents, oddly enough, love Metallica. Making a U-turn, Akerlund ventures to Botswana on the southern tip of Africa to visit a tribe of metalheads who sport leather jackets and cowboy hats and roar around on motorcycles blasting Metallica.
“It gives me the lion heart,” one said. “It makes you feel you belong to this world.”
Several fans in war-torn Middle Eastern countries are interviewed. One Syrian woman said that during her country’s civil war, Metallica’s machine gun guitars and explosive drums “represented life as I experienced it.”
In thoroughly covering the band’s large and diverse fan base, “Metallica Saved My Life” is repetitive at times and much longer than it needs to be, with one hagiographic testimonial after another peppered with comments by various sociological talking heads. It’s listed as 99 minutes, but the version I saw was almost two and a half hours, an operatic length for a one-note story.
The fans interviewed, who describe themselves as “dorks,” “weirdos” and “loners,” are identified only by their first names, with the exception of a couple of celebrities — actor Jason Momoa, who claims to listen to Metallica every day (“they’re part of my DNA”), and skateboard legend Tony Hawk, who said the band provides “the soundtrack for what we do.”
In having a devoted fan base, Metallica recalls another famous Marin band, the Grateful Dead, and its legions of Deadheads. As steadfast as the Deadheads are, though, hardcore Metallica fanatics may be even more extreme. A young woman named Christina sold her house so she could afford to travel full-time to Metallica shows.
“That made it much easier,” she said.
Asked if they had to choose between Metallica and each other, a young couple didn’t hesitate with an answer.
“I love you, but …” he said.
“Ow, that hurts,” she said and winced, also picking band over boyfriend.
One of the more touching stories involves a trans man who found a new family in fellow Metallica fans after he was rejected by his mother over his decision to transition. In a happy ending, they reconciled — at a Metallica concert.
Hetfield, who’s 62, and drummer and band co-founder Lars Ulrich, 61, have been poster boys for psychotherapy since the 2004 documentary “Some Kind of Monster” followed them through a near breakup over personal and professional conflicts that were successfully mediated by a “performance enhancement coach/psychotherapist” they paid $40,000 a month to work with them.
You hear time and time again in this film from fans who regard these wealthy rock stars as regular folks just like them, but it’s doubtful that they can afford that kind of professional help. Instead, the peer support and sense of community they get through their mutual love of Metallica they feel is an effective alternative.
“Whatever label you want to put on it — religion, cult, family — I don’t care,” Hetfield says in the film. “It’s a gathering of like-minded people there to celebrate life.”
Metallica, inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2009, has a long history with the Mill Valley Film Festival. In 2013, all four band members — Hetfield, Ulrich, guitarist Kirk Hammett and bassist Robert Trujillo — showed up at the Smith Rafael Film Center for the public premiere of their 3D concert film “Metallica: Through the Never.” In 2014, as an artist in residence, Ulrich hosted a screening of the drummer movie “Whiplash,” and Trujillo presented a documentary he produced, “Jaco,” about troubled jazz bassist Jaco Pastorius. Afterward, he and Hammett headlined a Pastorius tribute at the Sweetwater Music Hall in Mill Valley. In 2019, Ulrich introduced “Serendipity,” a documentary about French artist Prune Nourry’s breast cancer journey.
I once described Metallica as “the hometown heavy metal band that blows the ‘mellow Marin’ music image to smithereens.” While the band still has its headquarters in San Rafael, Hetfield and Ulrich no longer have the presence in Marin that they once did. Hetfield, who had lived in Marin since the 1980s with his family, donated most of his 1,100-acre Rocking H Ranch in Lucas Valley, not far from Skywalker Ranch, to the Marin Agricultural Land Trust. It was like a departing gift after he soured on Marin as “elitist” and moved to Vail, Colorado. Ulrich’s Tiburon mansion was reportedly sold for $10.3 million in 2020. He will be in Marin for the Oct. 9 screening of “Metallica Saved My Life” along with Akerlund, the director, to answer questions afterward.
“Metallica is all of us together,” Ulrich says in the film. “It belongs to all of us.”
Details: “Metallica Saved My Life” can be seen at 6 p.m. Oct. 9 at the Sequoia Cinema at 25 Throckmorton Ave. in Mill Valley and 3 p.m. Oct. 10 at the Smith Rafael Film Center at 1118 Fourth St. in San Rafael. An after-party will take place after the Oct. 9 screening at the Outdoor Art Club at 1 West Blithedale Ave. in Mill Valley.
Admission is $12 to $90. Get tickets and more information at mvff.com.
To reach the suicide and crisis hotline, dial 988.