"Spinal Tap"'s great feat is to mock music with music

Rating: 9/10 (25 October 2014)

Ironically, although the "mock" in this mockumentary is directed at various shades of rock between the British Invasion and the hair band era, the music of "Spinal Tap" is actually quite good. At the very least, it's good at being bad, and that's sometimes more than enough to get a song to the top of the charts. It's not exactly the quality, but the believability of the music being lampooned that makes "Spinal Tap" a great piece of satire. Like any good band documentary, the story of Spinal Tap is told through their music: they had more artistic phases than The Beatles, more previous members than Black Sabbath, and fell from grace like Guns 'N Roses, and at every stage their material is brilliantly, unmistakably derivative of those legends and their ilk. It's one thing to know exactly what's pretentious and corny and laughable about those acts, great as they all were, but it's another and deeply impressive thing to be able to showcase their excesses through music. Spinal Tap's early, Ed Sullivan-esque days sees them in mop tops and suits, singing jangly, catchy, teeny-bopper pop that really feels imported from the mid 1960s. Same for their flower- power days, the absurd put-ons of their goth rock era, the wanna-be virtuoso indulgence of their progressive experimentalism, and most of all, their preening, testosterone-driven glam rock of the late 1970s and early 80s. This last subgenre is the one the movie skewers most ruthlessly: the ridiculous songs "Heavy Duty" and "Big Bottom" are two of the wittiest and most scatological in the film, and at the same time are only slight exaggerations of real-life analogues.
Much of the non-musical material in "Spinal Tap" works just as brilliantly. The script is quotable in the extreme. It is concise and cutting with its observations on the music industry, as in hilarious dispute over a sexist album cover between a label executive (Fran Drescher) and Christopher Guests's oblivious lead guitarist Nigel Tufnel (one of many delightfully English names in the film).
At times, the movie is as earnest and emotional as real band documentaries can be. The Lennon/McCartney-inspired arc between best friends Nigel and David St. Hubbins (Michael McKean) could almost have been the focus of a straight drama. Near the end, that storyline strains the mockumentary format as the proportion of sentiment to snark shifts in favor of the former, but by this time the points have been scored. Spinal Tap has all the foibles of history's great rock bands, so it would be unfair, and inaccurate, if they didn't take on their essential likability, too.