“The only place I get hurt is out there. The world don’t give a shit about me.”

I. Well, I’m Frustrated and Outdated

The first voice you hear is a dead man’s scream. It’s one of those full-throated primal belts, like Roger Daltrey’s in “Won’t Get Fooled Again.” Here it’s Kevin DuBrow, his scalded screech busting the floodgates for “Bang Your Head (Metal Health),” the second single from Quiet Riot’s landmark Metal Health (1983), the first slab of fuzz ’n’ meedley to ever reach #1 on the Billboard Albums chart.

The band was at its mainstream zenith then. Randy “The Ram” Robinson (Mickey Rourke) was probably just getting started, years of toil finally paying off as professional wrestling graduated from the sweathouse din of high school gyms to respectable arenas in metropolitan cities. It came with a price, of course. Regional territories were swallowed by ambitious, growing monoliths. But that wouldn’t matter for a while, not even to the Ram. Luckily, he was in his prime, synchronous with the era. He was the ’80s.

Someday that would come back to haunt him, but someday was just a harmless, nebulous future. For now we’re in his past. Wisely, director Darren Aronofsky (on a Robert D. Siegel script) never shows us this past except as a collage of scattered magazines and handbills against the ghostly chatter of ringside patter and a raucous anthem that rocked a long-gone summer, growled by a man who in 2007 was silenced forever.

But Ram still struts to this hoary buzzsaw, having plucked it during its popularity and transformed it into his ring-entrance music. When the riffs kick in to summon his fist-pumping form, the crowds respond as they would at a concert. They know what’s coming: a classic blast from their childhoods, riding into town with a near-suicidal need to entertain. And the outcome is always predetermined. Once their faded hero climbs the ropes and drops that old-school Ram Jam finisher — his greatest hit — it’s over, brother.

All over. (more…)