This Is Spinal Tap

A metal tour that shrinks, and a mockumentary whose riffs nearly work

This Is Spinal Tap pretends to respect a band that is already collapsing in public. Rob Reiner’s 1984 mockumentary follows British heavy metal outfit Spinal Tap on an American tour that gets smaller as it goes, with Reiner himself as Marty DiBergi, the earnest filmmaker with a notepad and a straight face. Christopher Guest’s Nigel Tufnel, Michael McKean’s David St. Hubbins, and Harry Shearer’s Derek Smalls improvise most of what they say, which is why the stupidity has the texture of memory. Nobody winks hard enough to break the lens. The joke depends on the camera behaving as if these men were a real group worth documenting.

The gags are quoted so often now that they count as folklore. An amplifier whose numbers go to eleven. A Stonehenge prop delivered in inches instead of feet. An album cover, Smell the Glove, argued down to black on black. A procession of drummers who do not survive the job. Songs such as Big Bottom and Hell Hole are ridiculous and, if you have stood near a certain kind of stage, not ridiculous enough. They were written to be bad in a precise way: three chords, a myth, a crotch joke, a sustained drone. Metal’s grandeur and its paperwork sit in the same dressing room. The film leaves the door open.

What keeps it from becoming a sketch revue is affection mixed with accuracy. Guest, McKean, and Shearer know how a guitarist touches a neck when he is nervous, how a singer explains a lyric that has no explanation, how a manager promises a hall that has already cancelled. DiBergi is the audience’s stand-in and also part of the problem: the documentary that flatters a band into believing its own press kit. When the gigs shrink, the belief does not. That sad note under the laugh is why musicians still quote the film when a tour goes badly.