Movie Breakdown: Sound Of Metal (Noah)

Pre-Screening Stance:

At this point anything that features Riz Ahmed is pretty much a must-see.

Post-Screening Ramble:

Before I ever saw a trailer for this film or a one-sheet or anything, I had pretty much written off Sound of Metal. “The story of a drummer who has to rediscover his life after he goes deaf” sounds cloying. It sounds like another Hollywood feel-good flick where we see the bottom of the barrel and we see a character scrape themselves off of it. These feelings were put to rest five seconds into the film when Ruben (Riz Ahmed) and his bandmate/girlfriend Lou (Olivia Cooke) start thrashing out some two-person experimental metal in a dimly lit club. It’s heavy stuff – the music, and the general vibe. Ruben and Lou are recovering addicts and now, again, a two-person metal band who travel around in a vintage RV playing shows and taking care of each other. When Ruben suddenly (and terrifyingly) goes deaf one morning, their lives are thrown into disarray. Ruben ends up in a deaf community’s rehab program, learning to accept his new found existence. Here’s the thing: Sound of Metal has all the trappings of a feel-good flick – a challenge to overcome, a life to get back to, a misfit healed by a group of similar misfits, etc. – but Ahmed and the director, Darius Marder, use the trappings as touch points, footholds even, to tell a story about addiction and trying to move on. Ahmed’s performance is amazing. Ruben moves and speaks not like someone with demons, but someone who has demons directly below skin level. Every movement, word spoken, action is a battle to keep the demons at bay. It’s a testament to the performance that Ruben is entirely unpredictable. You know he’s going to make a bad decision, but you don’t know what and when and why. But if Ahmed played Ruben as just a bad apple returning to his ways, the film would just sink under the weight of its misery. Ahmed’s Ruben is sweetness wrapped in barbed wire, a recovering addict who wants nothing more than to return to the only source of love he’s ever really understood. The actor, in any year, deserves some recognition come awards time. And his performance is made better by Marder’s directorial decision to make this a film not just about deafness but about losing the ability to hear. The scenes where Ruben comes to grip with his hearing loss are visceral because Marder uses sound design to force the audience to experience what Ruben is going through. You lean into the screen trying to make out what muffled words are and then cringe when you realize how miserable it is. In the end, Sound of Metal takes pre-established story beats – recover! fail! rise back up! – and stretches them onto a new canvas, it makes the unoriginal, bold and exciting.

One Last Thought:

Paul Raci – who plays Joe in the film – is amazing. The type of actor so buried in his role, you start wondering, “where’d they find this guy?”