Review: This Is Spinal Tap (1984) — Movies for the Rest of Us with Bill Newcott

This Is Spinal Tap (1984)

⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️

Rating: R

Run Time: 1 hour 22 minutes

Writers: Rob Reiner, Michael McKean, Christopher Guest

Director: Rob Reiner

Rob Reiner’s mock-rockumentary. This Is Spinal Tap, is celebrating its 41^st anniversary with a 4K restoration and new national theatrical run — and if you think 41 is an oddball anniversary to commemorate, do remember that this is the heavy metal group who had all their amps modified to go from zero to 11.

In any case, there is never a bad time to revisit the groundbreaking and still subversively funny film that blends the earnest hagiography of Martin Scorsese’s The Last Waltz with the irreverent satire of Eric Idle’s The Rutles: All You Need Is Cash. What Reiner’s ingenious bit of alchemy yields is, some argue, the greatest rock and roll film ever made.

The setup couldn’t be simpler: Reiner plays Marty DiBergi, a doting documentary maker who sets out to follow Spinal Tap, a group he has been enamored with since the 1960s, on their first North American tour in the better part of a decade. The band has been away so long, in fact, that no one has clued them in that their brand of glittery glam rock has been out of style since David Bowie switched out Ziggy Stardust for The Thin White Duke.

Armed with a 16mm camera, Marty follows the band from one humiliation to another: concerts cancelled for lack of interest, hotels that book them and their roadies into one single room, album signing gigs that fail to draw one single fan.

Still, Spinal Tap forges ahead, dismissing each mounting sign of their imploding insignificance as a matter of bad timing, or mismanagement — or, most poignantly hilarious, the failure of audiences to comprehend the scope of their artistry.

Aside from Reiner — still burned into America’s psyche as Archie Bunker’s hippie son-in-law on All in the Family — those of us who witnessed the dawn of This Is Spinal Tap were, at best, vaguely familiar with the rest of the cast. Michael McKean (lead singer David St. Hubbins) was best known as the taller, possibly dumber half of Laverne & Shirley’s Lenny and Squiggy. Christopher Guest (guitarist Nigel Tufnel) had kicked around in some small TV and movie parts. Harry Shearer (bassist Derek Smalls), one of Hollywood’s busiest child actors in the 1950s (he worked with Abbott and Costello), had already embarked on the cartoon voiceover career that would one day earn him legend status on The Simpsons.

Relentlessly creative and crackling with energy, This Is Spinal Tap easily stands out simply as one of the 1980s top comedies. But the reason the film remains worth celebrating all these years later is the way it, without exaggeration, changed the very nature of what audiences considered funny. There had been mockumentaries before: Woody Allen’s Take the Money and Run relates the story of its hapless hero in the form of a straight-faced documentary; the guys in Monty Python’s Flying Circus loved presenting many of their skits (“Hell’s Grannies,” “The Funniest Joke in the World”) in the form of BBC-type news reports.

Those projects were, however, basically tightly scripted, extended skits. The essential genius of This Is Spinal Tap is in Reiner & Co. daring to use actual documentary production techniques in making their mockumentary: While there was an outline for each scene, there was no script to speak of. The entire cast improvised their dialogue while the single, hand-held camera rolled — more than 100 hours of footage was shot just to fill out This Is Spinal Tap’s final run time of 1 hour, 22 minutes (cinematographer Peter Smokler had shot the seminal 1971 rock documentary Celebration at Big Sur).

The scheme would only work if Reiner could assemble a top-tier cast of improv masters, and that he did: Look closely and you’ll spot the likes of Billy Crystal, Bruno Kirby, Ed Begley Jr., Fran Drescher, Dana Carvey, Howard Hesseman, Paul Shaffer, and Anjelica Huston — along with the undisputed master of the art, Fred Willard.

In the years after Spinal Tap unspooled, Guest and McKean went on to sharpen their mockumentary skills to Ginsu lethality: Best In Show, A Mighty Wind, and Waiting for Guffman pushed the mockumentary beyond a comedy outlier, establishing it as an outright film genre.

Now it can be argued that mockumentary is the defining comedy genre of the early 21^st century. By the time The Office and Parks and Recreation turned up, it was easy to forget how, at a time now vanishingly long ago, a ragtag group of improv geeks took their favorite form of goofing around — and turned the volume up to 11.