The “heavy metal fairy tale” documentary is more about the rock ‘n’ roll dream and how people on both sides of the monitors connect to it.

I’m Too Old for This Sh*t carries the subtitle “A Heavy Metal Fairy tale,” and this new documentary produced by Chris Jericho is that. It tells the story of Siren, a heavy metal band from Brandon, Florida in the early 1980s that never really happened, and the sudden, surprising, 30-years-later invitation it receives to play a heavy metal festival in Germany. That’s interesting, but it’s not the most interesting part of the movie. 

At some level, I’m Too Old for This Sh*t is a fish out of water story, particularly in the last 45 minutes when the members of Siren leave Brandon to fly to Germany. It’s fun and they struggle a bit, but the movie never becomes Spinal Tap. Instead, the members begin to show more distinctive personalities at that point and become more engaging. Still, but the fish-out-of-water story is as much of a reality television and documentary staple as the second-chance / better-late-than-never story, so the details change but the movie and its beats feel familiar. 

A couple of storytelling shortcuts make it hard for the main narrative to be the star. Drummer Ed Aborn and singer Doug Lee Siren started Siren while in high school, and after a few years of trying to get somewhere, Aborn bailed and the band that ended before it really had a chance to become something. That’s not exactly the way it happened, though. The documentary hints at a contract that Aborn didn’t know about, and it mentions 30 former members of Siren, so it sounds like Lee kept the band going for another few years after Aborn left. Since that would have bogged down the narrative, I get that director Nathan Mowery simplified the story the way he did, but that history beyond the first two recordings makes the invitation from the organizers of the German Keep It True Festival in 2018 slightly less improbable. It wasn’t simply someone’s short-lived high school band being rescued from obscurity,

And the festival is not the German heavy metal Coachella. Judging by its lineups from the last decade, Keep It True looks like the Ponderosa Stomp of heavy metal, presenting the genre’s unsung heroes and reunited acts. Since the festival’s programming leans toward 1980s metal aesthetically, Siren’s booking wasn’t winning the lottery; it was exactly the sort of booking Keep It True specialized in, which means Siren shared the stage with Hit Man, Saracen and Raven, not Metallica, Slipknot and Slayer.. 

I’m Too Old for This Sh*t works because it’s really a documentary about rock ’n’ roll and the ways people participate in it. One German fan convinced Keep It True’s promoter to book Siren, and he’s so over the top in his affection for Siren that it’s hard not to try to figure him out. Siren’s fine, but you don’t watch the band and think the cosmos fucked up by overlooking it. Siren’s not quite everyband, but it could be any band, which makes it hard to hear what inspires such rabid affection. His love of the band ultimately feels like a performance, like he’s in love with being the guy who’s in love with that band, and he loves being the guy who remembers bands like Siren. When he says he’d rather see Doug Lee than Iron Maiden’s Bruce Dickinson, he’s either lying or radically overvaluing obscurity, though that’s not uncommon. Over the years, I’ve talked with fans and industry people for whom obscurity was proof of genius. They assumed that since genuinely individual visions often struggled to find a place in the mainstream, music that failed to reach the mainstream must be individual. 

That’s not a safe assumption, but it’s an intoxicating one. In the movie, the superfan that championed Siren got to talk to them and hang out with them—something far less likely to happen with Iron Maiden—and you could see a similar phenomenon take place at Ponderosa Stomps. Fans cozied up to career journeyman artists as if they were Sam Cooke or James Brown, and after decades of neglect, many of the performers looked skeptically grateful for their enthusiasm. One night the late Roy Head—a sad 2020 loss—winked and mugged to me and a friend while autographing records at the bar of the House of Blues for just such a fan, simultaneously loving him and goofing on him for being such a mark. 

The rock ’n’ roll dream is a con, and Head knew it. Anybody who has been through decades of in the business knows that it’s not a meritocracy and your life isn’t transformed by a gig. Dreams can come true, but more often than not they don’t. Or they end up far more two-bit than you could ever imagine. That adds a low-grade tension to the last half of the movie. Mowery sets us up to wonder how Siren will perform or be received, but that’s never really in doubt. The more compelling but unasked question is what will happen after the Keep it True Festival. After getting the rock ’n’ roll experience, how do the members go back to their day jobs? Do they go back to their day jobs, or do they mistake the very specific nature of the festival and its fans for the larger population of heavy metal fans and assume that there’s a place for Siren? You know the answer to that question before one of the final shots in the movie tells us that Siren is working on a new album. It came out in April. 

The relationship between members of Siren, the fans, the festival and the rock ’n’ roll dream gives I’m Too Old for This Sh*t its pop. At a warm-up show that Siren plays before the festival, the singer for the headliner drops a television on his head, busting open his forehead in the process. He’s a peer of Siren’s and clearly too old to have that kind of extreme showmanship pay off beyond the moment and the room, but he does it anyway. The film doesn’t linger over that two-bit spectacle, but questions about what motivates him and almost everybody in the documentary keep you hooked. And in Siren, Mowery gets some people you can get invested in. Aborn seems sensible enough to have some perspective on how Siren fits into the music world today, and bassist Gregg Culbertson appears to respect and appreciate the miraculous nature of the experience. 

The documentary also says that the title’s a lie. Siren did successfully rock a crowd, and it has gone on to record more music. Keep it True’s on-camera fans skewed older too, and they were still as passionate about not just heavy metal but their heavy metal—the bands and sounds they grew up on, even if the bands only existed for a single or two. Loving Siren in 2018 was a way to honor their 20-year-old selves that used mail order to buy obscure 45s that they only found in ‘zines. Age is clearly part of the story, but it’s subtler and less crotchety than the title suggests. At one point in the movie, Aborn says, looking back, “I love the 18-year-old me who sweated his ass off in the garages and the warehouses and had the dream.”