The Real Bro-Mance

In theaters this Spring is a Jewish Bro-Mance film that has created some buzz. I Love You Man, stars Paul Rudd as Peter Klaven and Jason Segel as Sydney Fife. In the story by Larry Levin (originally titled “Let’s Make Friends”), and directed and co-written by John Hamburg, Peter gets engaged to his girlfriend and realizes he has no male close friends that can serve as his Best Man. In his search for a “Bro” he bonds with Sydney, a real man’s man.

But, I am here to tell you that this fictional “Jewish” Bro-mance pales in comparison to another film now playing in major American cities, a Canadian documentary about two Jewish men who bonded in April 1973, in their Toronto high school, swore to rock forever, and have maintained their friendship and their virtually unknown, heavy metal band for decades. Theirs is the true bro-mance. I am writing about the 2008 Sundance Film Festival favorite, “Anvil! The Story of Anvil.”

“Anvil” is the name of a Canadian heavy metal band, and the film chronicles with love their current state and their decision to make a tour of some European cities in an effort for glory or a new recording contract. Viewers have likened them to the REAL “This is Spinal Tap” due to all the comic foibles and hilarity that ensues. But Jewish viewers will hopefully get an added benefit and realize that it is also a story of two Jewish men who have maintained a lifelong bonding friendship and learn to recover from fights and arguments along the way. Rob Reiner, plays drums, and Steve “Lips” Kudlow, is the lead singer and guitarist of the band. How many docs have you seen in which the more successful family members wish that their brother had gone into accounting or the family business, than maintain a simple blue collar job and live to simply make music and raise a loving family? Or how many rockers wish that their Holocaust surviving father was still alive to see their success?

Anvil had a period of brief popularity in the 1980s but never hit the bigtime. They did make it to #191 on a top 200 list for a brief moment. Yet although they have remained in obscurity, the leaders of the heavy metal scene, Slash of Guns N’ Roses, Lars Ulrich of Metallica and Lemmy Kilmister of Motörhead, have paid homage to Anvil, having been influenced by Anvil’s early metal on metal CDs. Sacha Gervasi is the documentary’s director. Gervasi, who wrote the screenplay for “The Big Tease” and “The Terminal,” sort of ran away to Canada one summer as a teenager in order to work as a roadie for the band.

If you get a chance, see this real bro-mance.