Like Spinal Tap — but for real

Hewn from even darker material is The Ramones: End of the Century, a dissection of the pain and bitterness that destroyed New York’s first and greatest punk band (pictured above). By comparison, the drug busts and on-stage fisticuffs captured by Dig!, an insider account of the love-hate rivalry between the Dandy Warhols, the retro-rockers from Portland, Oregon, and LA’s psychedelic revivalists the Brian Jonestown Massacre, feel like mildly sordid light relief.

All three films — which make their UK debuts at film festivals over the coming months — stand out because the rock documentary form has been debased in recent years, becoming a promotional tool largely commissioned and controlled by record companies. Indeed, Some Kind of Monster started life as an in-house project for Metallica’s paymasters, Elektra.

When the label balked at its anti-heroic tone, though, the band and film-makers bought out their share. “All they wanted was a clip-driven, historical, glorified history of Metallica,” says Joe Berlinger, who co-directed Some Kind of Monster with Bruce Sinofsky. “The challenge of making the film was managing the management and managing the record label.”

Fortunately for them, Berlinger and Sinofsky convinced Hetfield and Ulrich that the film had both therapeutic and commercial value. “There was a lot of passive aggression that is not always easy to see on film, but it was palpable in the recording sessions,” says Sinofsky. “The crescendo was when James walked out the door and slammed it. We didn’t see him for another 11 months.”

Feeling like a real-life This is Spinal Tap at times, much of the comic relief in Some Kind of Monster is provided by Phil Towle, a therapist and “performance coach” who steered Hetfield and Ulrich through years of unresolved tension. Towle became a Metallica fixture for two years, only to be jettisoned when the monsters of heavy rock finally got their mojos working again.

“We may question why he stayed longer than maybe he should have, but there would be no Metallica today without him,” Sinofsky insists. “This band had such a degree of dysfunction, their communication was so shut down, they were so ready to call it quits. Phil definitely saved that band.”

If Some Kind of Monster is tragicomic farce, End of the Century is pure tragedy. Directed by Jim Fields and Michael Gramaglia, the film began as a metaphorical post-mortem examination of the Ramones and ended up a literal one.

First, the singer Joey Ramone died of lymphatic cancer in 2001, shortly after agreeing to a “therapy session” of interviews. Then, as filming was finished after six tortuous years, the bass player Dee Dee Ramone overdosed and, soon after being interviewed, the former Clash frontman Joe Strummer died of a heart attack. And a few months ago it emerged that the guitarist Johnny Ramone was being treated for prostate cancer.

“It got to be we were afraid to ask for interviews,” says Gramaglia. “We felt like a rock’n’roll Grim Reaper.”

In between fatalities, Fields and Gramaglia wrestled for years with hard-knuckled managers and paranoid band members, virtually bankrupting themselves in the process. Their bittersweet reward was a revealing insight into the “dysfunctional family dynamic” at the heart of the Ramones.

A misfit gang of working-class street toughs from Queens, the punk pioneers were ruled with iron-willed intransigence by Johnny Ramone. Johnny emerges as the Michael Corleone of the film, ruthlessly seeing off all rivals for control of his empire.

“Johnny is hard to like,” Gramaglia admits. “But you have to sort of take him at face value and admire him for being so honest about who he is. There is no glamorising. Johnny really is the Ramones in the sense that he’s uncompromising.”

The dark heart of End of the Century is a festering feud over Linda, the former fiancée who left Joey in 1982 to marry Johnny. Even 20 years later, with Joey long dead, this subject proved highly sensitive for the film-makers. “What surprised me was how vicious and unyielding it was,” says Fields. “Even after they die, it just goes on. It’s like pain beyond anything you could imagine.”

Another classic rock feud is documented by the director Ondi Timoner in Dig!, the Grand Jury Prize winner at January’s Sundance Film Festival. Timoner’s hilarious portrait of the volatile rivalry between Courtney Taylor- Taylor, the careerist singer of the Dandy Warhols, and Anton Newcombe, the charismatic but self-destructive leader of the Brian Jonestown Massacre, has been described as “an indie-rock Amadeus”.

Like the Metallica and Ramones films, Dig! teases out the petty vanities of its anti- heroic protagonists with a careful balance of affection and voyeurism. “It’s about a very personal human struggle, about a friendship turned into a rivalry,” says Timoner. “It’s really just a great drama set against the music industry.”

Could the near-simultaneous arrival of these three films herald a new trend in brutally honest rockumentaries? Jim Fields is not so sure.

“I guess it’s a coincidence,” he shrugs, “but it’s also cool because it’s taking the genre and actually using it as real film-making, rather than just making a corporate piece. They actually have character development and all that stuff. I mean, I loved the Metallica movie, and I don’t even like Metallica. That’s what’s great about it.”

Metallica: Some Kind of Monster opens nationwide on October 1; The Ramones: End of the Century is at the Raindance Film Festival in London (www.raindance.co.uk), which starts on October 1; Dig! will be shown on October 27 as part of the Times bfi London Film Festival (www.rlff.org)