Metal Lords: Story Plot and Star Cast All We Can Expect From, Netflix’s Homage To Heavy Music Film

The history of cinema is not that rich in metal films. Lovers of the genre often remember the cult Morte a 33 rpm or the recent Deathgasm , Heavy Trip and Metalhead , without forgetting the hilarious Studio 666 of the Foo Fighters and the (discussed) biopic Lord of Chaos on the bloody vicissitudes of Norwegian black metal and the his most famous band, the Mayhem of Dead, Euronymous and Varg Vikernes alias Burzum. To broaden this subgenre we think Metal Lords, the teenage-metalhead comedy produced for Netflix by Greg Shapiro (the producer of – among others – The Hurt Locker, Zero Dark Thirty and the Harold & Kumar saga) with the prestigious accompaniment of Tom Morello (the guitarist of Rage Against the Machine) in the role of “executive music producer”.

Considering that the largest audience target for the streaming platform are teenagers, the film uses the setting (the school) and the genre topos (friendship, dreams for the future, first loves) for a classic coming- of-age physical and metaphorical towards adulthood . Without renouncing pleasure even to adults who in the eighties and nineties grew up between Iron Maiden, Slayer and Metallica, Sepultura, Pantera and Korn.

Metal Lords: The Plot

Metal Lords starts out as the typical “high school movie” among the high school benches. Hunter and Kevin are two teenagers who are maladjusted and frowned upon by other peers because they are metalheads, therefore bluntly branded as “crazy satanists” or “junkies with no future”. The two don’t care: their only goal is to win the local Battle of the Bands and become the gods of the heavy metal to come.

Metal is not just a passion: it is a lifestyle , it is “power and speed”. Hunter plays guitar and sings screaming in scream and growl, and heavy music helps him cope with a difficult family life. Kevin is introverted and lonely, he has always had problems expressing himself and beating hard on the skins of his drums helps him a lot. There is only one problem before reaching eternal glory in the Olympus of extreme riffs: their band, already renamed Skull f *cker, is missing a bassist. And nobody likes metal at school.

Everyone in their class loves Justin Bieber, Ed Sheeran and Imagine Dragons and they don’t even know who Black Sabbath, Motörhead and Judas Priest are. Fierce and undeterred, Hunter and Kevin give a damn and decide to go ahead anyway to show the rest of the high school how much they are worth. The search for the bassist takes a sudden turn when the two engage Emily, a classically trained cellist who agrees to join the band and whom Kevin has a crush on.

With Emily aboard, who will not have a look exactly “in line” with that of the group but has a lot of anger bubbling inside her, the Skull f *cker has the ultimate mission to fulfill try to convince their classmates of the Glenwood Lake High to experience the thrill of metal and their own passion for wild solos and tight rhythms of hard’n’heavy music. As difficult a feat as taking a Harry Styles fan to an Ozzy Osbourne concert.

Metal Lords: The Cast

The protagonists Kevin and Hunter are played by Jaeden Martell and Adrian Greensmith the first launched by St. Vincent by Ted Melfi, It by Andy Muschietti, Cena con delitto – Knives Out by Rian Johnson and In defense of Jacob by Mark Bomback; the second in his absolute debut after his debut at the Royal Central School in London. Jaeden is a “son of art”: his father is chef Wes Lieberher, with a past as a vocalist in Kill Verona, an emo-punk band from Philadelphia.

The cellist Emily is instead the Scottish Isis Hainsworth , appreciated on stage at the Bridge Theater in the role of Hermia in A Midsummer Night’s Dream directed by Nicholas Hytner, seen in the cinema and on TV between Emma , ​​Wanderlust and The competition by Philippa Lowthorpe and next protagonist of Catherine Called Birdy by Lena Dunham. In the rest of the cast stand out Joe Manganiello (in a “mysterious” role) and Noah Urrea of ​​Now United, the global pop phenomenon made up of 15 singers and dancers from 15 different countries.

• Jaeden Martell: Kevin Schlieb
• Adrian Greensmith: Hunter Sylvester
• Isis Hainsworth: Emily Spector
• Joe Manganiello
• Brett Gelman: Hunter’s father
• Sufe Bradshaw: Dean Swanson
• Katie O’Grady: Laurie Schlieb
• Michelle Fang: Lisa Randall
• Noah Urrea: Clay Moss
• Analesa Fisher: Kendall Sarn
• Phelan Davis: Rocky “Skip” Hoffman

Metal Lords: The Director And The Screenwriter

Behind Metal Lords is DB Weiss, the creator of Game of Thrones with David Benioff and longtime metalhead. His three desert island records are Black Sabbath’s Master of Reality , Metallica’s Ride the Lightning and Judas Priest’s Screaming for Vengeance . Born in 1971, the screenwriter has been working on this project since the early 2000s but had to postpone it when he was hired by HBO for George RR Martin’s fantasy.

When Benioff and Weiss began their partnership with Netflix, Shapiro encouraged him to brush up on this script. At that point came the “blessing” of Lisa Nishimura, Netflix’s Vice President Original Documentary and Comedy Programming with a record past for Island Records. Metal Lords has become what Weiss calls “the fulfillment of a wish” in an interview with Entertainment Weekly.

When you are 15, you feel confused and not very powerful. You feel that you cannot live your life as you would like. Fantasy is about power. You re-conceive yourself as a larger-than-life heroic figure. And that’s probably what attracted a lot of guys like me to music.

The screenwriter tells Billboad magazine that Metal Lords wants to clear metal – a music “on the surface dark and aggressive, often destined to scare people” – breaking down prejudices and stereotypes through a coming-of-age story capable of making viewers feel at the end of the viewing. “a little better than they felt in the beginning”.

The purposes for which the music is intended are often the opposite of its appearance. Metal is music for people who don’t feel they have a place in the world they see around them. Music for people who are looking for a way to express that feeling of being an outsider.

Weiss has known Tom Morello since Game of Thrones . For the release of the series, RATM guitarist Nuno Bettencourt of Extreme and Scott Ian of Anthrax played the fantasy theme with Weiss and composer Ramin Djwadi using three special Fenders. In the case of Metal Lords, the pieces of Skull f *cker bear the signature of Morello: the first single, Machinery of Torment, is a damn old-school song, between atmospheres à la Black Sabbath of the period of Ronnie James Dio and a guitar in Celtic Frost style.

Morello agreed to collaborate on Metal Lords because the story of Kevin and Hunter closely reminds him of his anarchic adolescence in New York, Kenya and Illinois, where at 13 he started his first cover band, the Nebula , before forming Electric Sheep with Tool guitarist Adam Jones on bass.

I grew up in a small, conservative and isolated suburb where my musical tastes ran counter to almost everyone else at school and certainly to all teachers, so this is something I can hear and understand. It’s a story of guys trying to put their first band together and have a dream, but maybe they don’t have the technical skill or the artistic vision to make that dream come true. For me, it fits in many ways with the true story of so many kids who are locked up in these suburban hells and the key to getting out of it is an electric guitar or drums or rock and roll music. Music shows a way to transcend this suffocating everyday existence, to try to become something better, something more authentic and truer than what is given to you by the

Metal Lords is directed by Peter Sollett , author of the acclaimed short film Five Feet High and Rising , which won awards at the Cannes Cinéfondation and Sundance and later became his debut feature, Raising Victor Vargas . Sollett then directed the romantic Nick & Norah – It All Happened in One Night with Michael Cera and Kat Dennings and Freeheld – Love, Justice, Equality with Julianne Moore and Ellen Page, a reconstruction of the true story of Laurel Hester, the cancer patient who he fought in court for the recognition of the reversibility and the inheritance of his house to his partner Stacie Andree.

Metal Lords: The Exit

Fussy and extremely accurate, Metal Lords is full of references to both legends of the genre who had a decisive influence on the birth of this music and to bands of the extreme panorama less known by the general public but equally important as Celtic Frost, Anthrax, Manowar and King Diamond. But above all, Metal Lords is part of this year’s music-themed cinema with a different perspective: that of centering all the solitude and grandeur of a “species” now in danger of extinction, that of metalheads. The appointment is set on Netflix for April 8^th, 2022.