Sound of Metal (2019)

Jack and I really liked this deeply moving story of a heavy metal drummer who suddenly begins to lose his hearing. Riz Ahmed, leading the cast as Ruben, has lots of nominations and a few wins already, as does Paul Raci as Joe. Olivia Cooke is also good as Ruben's girlfriend Lou and Mathieu Amalric makes a cameo at the end as her father.

Director/co-writer Darius Marder keeps us on the edge of our seats with the script co-written by his brother Abraham Marder and based on a story by Darius Marder and Derek Cianfrance. This fascinating article about the genesis and production of the movie has no spoilers. Two days ago the writers were nominated by their peers for The Writers Guild Award for Best Original Screenplay. Here's my running list.

The score, attributed to Nicolas Becker and Abraham Marder, is not available online, save for one song on Apple Music and Spotify. We did laugh out loud at the beginning at the screaming heavy metal concert. It's not supposed to be funny.

The sound design, going from the annoying (to us) metal to the representation of what Ruben can make out, is very interesting, and will probably win some awards on its own for Becker as the supervising sound editor. We watch everything with closed captions. But the American Sign Language (ASL) was not captioned until the character Ruben could understand it. Artistic choice.

Ahmed was last blogged for Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, Cooke for Thoroughbreds, Amalric for A Secret, and Darius Marder and Cianfrance for writing and directing, respectively, The Place Beyond the Pines, before which Marder wrote and directed one documentary.

Raci is new to me despite a number of credits. Abraham Marder contributed music to his brother's 2008 documentary. Becker worked in the sound department of hundreds of projects and scored over twenty.

Rotten Tomatoes' critics and audiences are hearing the good news, averaging 96 and 91%. Listen to them and us, and watch it on Amazon Prime, as we did last week.