‘Sound Of Metal’ Is A Work Of Surpassing Sensitivity and Patience

The first time it happens he’s up before his girlfriend in the Airstream trailer they share. He’s an early riser, always has been, and he’s making breakfast when everything goes hollow – like when there’s water trapped in your ears that you can’t clear no matter how you try. He tries. He opens his mouth wide to release pressure, maybe, takes a hot shower and lets his ears bathe in it; maybe wash out whatever’s gotten in there. It doesn’t help. He plays a show that night – he’s a drummer, Ruben (Riz Ahmed) is, for a heavy metal band fronted by his girl Lou (Olivia Cooke) and he can’t hear what he’s playing and so he pounds by rote. The next night, another show, he leaves in the middle of the set. He sees a doctor. It’s not going to get better and there’s no solution to the problem covered by health insurance that he doesn’t have anyway. He is, as they say, and in this particular pursuit in the way to which he’s become accustomed to pursuing it, fucked.

Darius Marder’s Sound of Metal is a film about being fucked in a year that has produced, with things like Nomadland and First Cow, a spate of notable and notably contemplative films about similar states of loss and of being lost. Between these ruminations on being adrift and what seems an embarrassment of time loop concepts, it seems films now, as always, have found the crest of the zeitgeist, riding it into shore. Ruben has his health, of course, all of it save his hearing and he’s given the opportunity in the film to chart a different course, an effective and vital one, should he be enough like water to fill a different role. Lou leaves him for a while to force him to enter a home for junkies who are also hearing impaired to get his shit together. Did I mention Ruben’s a recovering addict? He’s that, too, and the better we get to know him the more I start to think he’s addicted to the rush of performance – or maybe addicted to Lou who doesn’t really have a place for him in her life if he’s not keeping the beat while she’s wailing into a sea of faces. It would be easy to say that their roles in the band are metaphors for their relationship except that that seems to be the case in a way that isn’t pat in Sound of Metal, but almost elegant.

For a while it seems like Ruben will give being productive, albeit in a different way than he’s used to, a try: that he’ll learn to accept what he can’t control and lean into the opportunities being presented to him. But then, like Christopher Reeve in Somewhere in Time accidentally finding a reminder of the life he’s left behind, Ruben hears the call of the familiar and is pulled apart. There’s a scene where he sits across a table from the founder of the home for junkies and the hearing impaired, Joe (Paul Raci), to tell him about a decision he’s made and how he could use some help if possible. We know Joe loves Ruben and I thought he was going to help him – but Sound of Metal is wise enough to know that Joe loves Ruben enough not to help him. There’s so much pain in their interaction. I expected this kind of performance from Ahmed – I was leveled to find it in journeyman Raci. I think a lot now about a scene in an empty playground, too, where Ruben thumps on a metal slide, sitting at the bottom of it while a young, hearing-impaired kid puts his head against the top of it, eyes closed. Matthews pulls back into a medium shot, then a long shot, and there’s something painterly about not just its composition, but in the image’s primal richness and depth. We, as a species, probably first told our story to the beat of a drum. That vibration rolls through caverns in us, measureless and forgotten.

Ruben and Lou reunite at her father’s (the great Mathieu Amalric) exclusive flat where dad, Richard, fixes him a soft-boiled egg and tells Ruben frankly that he has never really liked Ruben for his daughter, but that he’s grateful now that he was there for Lou when nobody else was. There’s a detail early when we see Lou sleeping in the back of their Airstream, hand tucked beneath her cheek. It’s a row of straight-line scars raised on her forearm. Not remnants of a suicide, but evidence of cutting behavior: the endorphin addiction that comes from little deaths going marching, slash slash slash slash. I thought about how they looked like the lines on music charts, or the stroke-notations for percussion parts in sheet music. Ruben tells Lou a few times how she saved his life. Lou tells Ruben the same thing. It doesn’t mean that they’ll end up together, but it does mean that they bought each other another chapter.

Ahmed gives Ruben an agitated, aggressive, Ratso variety of energy that would be difficult to empathize with were it not for the extraordinary intelligence and sense of decency Ahmed gives Ruben, too. It’s a complex performance that never feels like a performance. I’ve known Ruben, a lot of Rubens. Shit happens to them and then it keeps happening to them. They’re good kids, smart and decent, but then they show you the scar where they were stabbed once at a party and tell stories about that year they spent homeless. I’ve known Joe, too, and Lou the product of a wealthy upbringing brought to crisis by a series of unfortunate events. The difference between Ruben and Lou, though, is that Lou has other people who care for her in her life and a history that isn’t all a sad story of abandonment and disillusionment. Ruben says to Lou, repeats it like a mantra in answer to a question she hasn’t asked, “it’s okay… it’s okay”. He chants it almost, like an incantation, like a backbeat. He does it until she can feel what he means in the rhythm of how he says it. It’s the only way he can communicate now that his hearing is wrong. It’s the only way, really, he ever could.

Sound of Metal is a work of surpassing sensitivity and patience. A slow work, a deep work, one with almost no real exposition that requires the things said and the spaces between to resonate with your own experiences of love, hope, heartache and desperation. It’s an exceedingly fine film. The best thing I could say about any film is that now, a week after first watching it, I find myself now and again wondering how Ruben is now – if he’s found a way forward, if he’s, you know, if he’s okay. I hope so. He deserves a little happiness.

Walter Chaw is the Senior Film Critic for filmfreakcentral.net. His book on the films of Walter Hill, with introduction by James Ellroy, is due in 2020. His monograph for the 1988 film MIRACLE MILE is available now.

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