Butler's Cinema Scene

Riz Ahmed

“SOUND OF METAL” My rating: B

120 minutes | MPAA rating: R

Ruben (Riz Ahmed) lives for music.

He tours in a two-person heavy-metal band with his girlfriend Lou (Olivia Cooke); she sings and plays screeching guitar;  he pounds the drums.

They live in an RV that also serves as a recording studio. Life is good.

At least until the gig when, in the middle of setting up their CD sales table at a venue, the conversations around Ruben go muffled and indecipherable. He’s able to get through the gig on sense memory, but it’s clear that something is seriously wrong.

Darius Marder’s “Sound of Metal” is about coming to terms with a change so complete and final that it traumatically divides a person’s life into before and after segments. This film is  often painful to watch; it’s also deeply moving, thanks to a couple of killer performances.

A trip to the audiologist confirms that Ruben is rapidly losing his hearing. Whether the cause is his and Lou’s eardrum-shredding music or something more organic really doesn’t matter.  There’s not much that can be done.

Ruben’s crisis heightened by his being a recovering addict. Lou senses — probably rightly — that he’s likely to turn to drugs as a coping mechanism.  That’s why she gets online to find a rehab program aimed specifically at deaf people.

And so Ruben finds himself enrolled in a community operated by Joe (Paul Raci, absolutely incredible), a deaf man who offers a crash course in sign language while keeping his clients clean. Ruben is welcome…but like a G.I. in boot camp he must send Lou away and dump his cell phone. He has to learn a lot in a limited time.

Paul Raci

“Sound of Metal’s” takes an almost documentary approach to its subject.  The supporting players are mostly hearing impaired and the screenplay by Marder and Derek Cianfrance assumes a sort of observational matter-of-factness in presenting the various stages of Ruben’s progress.

But on one level the film is brilliantly subjective. The sound design by Jaime Baksht, Michelle Couttolenc and Carlos Cortes shifts between “normal” and the world as experienced by Ruben, where sounds are muted, distorted or altogether missing.

That, combined with Ahmed’s performance, establishes the terror of a man losing the one sense he has always regarded as essential to his personality and his survival.

Though “Sound of Metal” never gets preachy about it, the film is very much about deaf culture. Ruben rebels against his condition and, grasping at straws, pawns everything he owns to receive a cochlear implant.  This results in a heart-wrenching riff with Joe, who runs his operation on the idea that deafness is not a handicap but merely another way of living. In his desperation to regain his hearing, Ruben is defying that belief.

In the film’s latter stages Ruben is reunited in France with Lou, who has been living with her well-to-do father (Mathieu Amalric). These passages feel a bit tentative and off; the casting of a major film star like Amalric (he was a Bond villain, after all) in what is basically a cameo seems like overkill.

But this segment does set up the viewer for the film’s final statement about accepting one’s fate.

| Robert W. Butler