Metal Lords

Written by "Game of Thrones" co-creator D.B. Weiss, "Metal Lords" is small and patchy even by the standards of a Netflix comedy.

It’s only when SkullFucker is behind their instruments that the movie goes hard enough to find something cathartic in the same dissonance that holds the rest of it back. The only problem is that Kevin and Hunter need a bassist, and they’re fresh out of friends. All that matters to Hunter is that, by some wild stroke of good luck, his shy buddy Kevin happens to be a totally sick drummer. Flimsy and stilted as this thing might be on a scene-by-scene basis (an awkward bit in which SkullFucker auditions new bassists crystallizes the botched “‘Sing Street’ meets Judas Priest” vibe), Sollett’s movie vividly radiates with the all-too-relatable energy of being an unmoored kid who’s looking for any kind of identity that might anchor you in place. Screenwriter D.B. Weiss may be a bonafide head-banger who’s spent most of his career trying to bring SkullFucker to the screen — the “Game of Thrones” co-creator first began shopping the script before he ever stepped foot in Westeros — but most of the story beats in this overfamiliar coming-of-age saga are as metal as the Imagine Dragons cover that SkullFucker’s rivals bust out during the climactic face-off. The devil is in the details when it comes to “Metal Lords,” which turns out to be the saving grace of a film that desperately needed the devil to show up somewhere.

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There is a movie about metalheads. But not just any devotees to metal music, oh no. This is a film about two musicians in a metal band that love this craft and ...

Metal Lords is just the kind of teen comedy you’d expect a Netflix algorithm to spit out. The dissonance between the schmaltzy air of Metal Lords and such a deeply disturbed protagonist makes for a most disagreeable kind of viewing. The nadir of her role comes in a supposedly cheer-worthy moment in the third act that, among other grave shortcomings, shamelessly rips off Grease and The Breakfast Club. Even the use of metal music itself is uninspired. Screenwriter D.B. Weiss trots out a doctor character in the third act to practically turn to the camera and reassure the viewer that Hunter isn’t a sociopath. Instead, save for the occasional use of Dutch angles, Metal Lords often has a flat look with no interesting uses of lighting or blocking to speak of. Nobody is going to be invested in this kid who makes Bender from The Breakfast Club look like Paddington Bear. Even if there wasn’t a vastly superior movie about struggling metal musicians to compare it to, though, Metal Lords would still be a decidedly off-key enterprise. Somehow, this problem in Metal Lords gets even worse once it embarrassingly tries to address it. Hunter is the problem with Metal Lords, plain and simple. But the film he occupies doesn’t recognize the seriousness of his actions. Watching this film, you can’t help but get swept up in the camaraderie and dedication to this craft, even if you don’t know Avenged Sevenfold from Slipknot.

D.B. Weiss' Netflix movie Metal Lords seems to have been equally inspired by Lukas Moodysson's 2013 kid-punk movie We Are the Best! and Weiss' own teenage ...

No matter what happened in the first 90 minutes of Metal Lords, it needed to culminate in a great musical moment. The day a metalhead first hears “War Pigs” (or “Master of Puppets,” or “The Number of the Beast”) often ends up feeling like the first day of the rest of their life. Less convincing is the film’s depiction of Emily, a kind of Metal Pixie Dream Girl who serves as a love interest for Kevin, as well as what Hunter cringingly calls a “Yoko” for Skullfucker. She’s introduced in a scene where she screams at the school’s marching-band director (author Chuck Klosterman) and spikes her clarinet into the turf. (Counterpoints: Game of Thrones is metal as hell, and metal elitists should just get over themselves already.) Lukas Moodysson’s anarchic 2013 feature We Are the Best! — a clear influence on Metal Lords — is steeped in punk, not metal, but it also bestows loud music on its disaffected teen protagonists as an amulet against the conformity of their Swedish hometown. His none-more-black wardrobe, the posters on the walls of his rehearsal space, and his knee-jerk rejection of all non-metal music leave no doubt. That describes Metal Lords’ Hunter — but it pointedly doesn’t hold true for Kevin, or for Skullfucker’s eventual third member, the classical-loving cellist Emily (Isis Hainsworth). Metal Lords does its most interesting work in the gaps between its leads’ relationships to the genre. It’s a slight film, and an almost self-consciously low-key follow-up to the massive Game of Thrones, but Weiss has the personal experience to make its humbler ambitions work. He channels all his energy into cultivating an encyclopedic knowledge of metal and practicing the guitar. Metal Lords centers on a pair of childhood best friends with a gulf widening between them in their middle teens. Kevin doesn’t know much about the music, but he agrees to play drums in Skullfucker, the high-school band Hunter believes will conquer the world. In August 2019, just a few months after the polarizing finale of Game of Thrones aired on HBO, showrunners D.B. Weiss and David Benioff inked a $200 million deal with streaming giant Netflix. Their eagerness to move on to other projects was apparent by the end of Thrones’ run, but the stream of new material has come at a trickle so far.

Director Peter Sollett (Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist) and writer D.B. Weiss (co-creator of Game of Thrones) team up to tell an unlikely (yet ...

As opposed to being approached from a totally insular perspective, the film showcases the process of developing a new musical taste, cementing itself in the teenage wonder of subversive discovery. Yet as a crash course for the unlearned, Metal Lords delivers plenty of earworms, including the original tune Skullfucker eventually plays during the battle of the bands (co-written by Morello and Weiss). Clearly, a lot of heavy metal heart went into the film—even if it’s crowded by its inspirations and rudimentary in its music cues. Rage Against the Machine’s Tom Morello occupies the role of executive music producer (though his own band’s music is mostly lacking from the film), offering a soundtrack featuring the best of Metallica, Iron Maiden and Judas Priest. Yet, it also feels like a relatively paltry selection; certain needle drops are even repeated—specifically the first few licks of Mastodon’s “Blood and Thunder”—which comes off as a tad lazy considering Morello’s curatorial insight. During the film’s third act, a quasi-jail break occurs in order for the band to get their founding member to the all-important gig, again mimicking the daring ploy School of Rock’s young students execute to get their teacher to the battle of the bands. Although most of his musical talent lies in playing the snare drum in marching band, Kevin (Jaeden Martell) is recruited by his best friend Hunter (Adrian Greensmith) to man the drum kit in his heavy metal band, edgily dubbed Skullfucker. While Kevin might not necessarily possess the chops to play “polyrhythms,” Hunter knows enough about the genre and its broader subculture to give his friend a general crash course. Sure, the motivations of these characters are totally inane, and the narrative may appear desperately contrived.

Game of Thrones' D.B. Weiss hopes you get caught in the mosh of his screenplay about teen outcasts.

Thou shall not question Hunter’s cred or authenticity as a character, a guy who is metal all the time and declares everything around him to be metal or not metal (and for what it’s worth, and you probably already came to this realization, Game of Thrones is very thoroughly metal). His best buddy is a meek dorkish type, Kevin (Martell), who joined the marching band so he could get out of phys ed. Our Call: STREAM IT. Nobody’s gonna be moved to tears or strain themselves laughing, but Metal Lords is more likely to win you over than lose you in the mosh. In that sense, the movie’s doing more than just exploiting a niche for a few cheap laughs, instead showing honest affection for the music, for how fun it is to take such OTT stuff so seriously. A battle of the bands looms on the horizon, and nothing could fulfill Hunter’s power fantasies more than showing all those preppies and jocks and mean girls how hard he röcks. That’s Hunter (Greensmith), an unforgiving, uncompromising teenager who lives for metal, and if you take a look at him and think he’s a bit of a stretch of a caricature, I’m here to assure you that there are people in real life who are pretty far gone just like him, and I know some of them. The heavy metal subculture gets co-opted for coming-of-age dramedy fodder in Metal Lords, now on Netflix. Fun fact: Game of Thrones co-creator D.B. Weiss is a Metal Guy, so he scripted and produced this story starring newcomer Adrian Greensmith as a leather-and-denim diehard headbanger and Jaeden Martell as his best drummer buddy, who contend with the usual high school hardships – while wearing Iron Maiden and Celtic Frost T-shirts, of course.