This is Spinal Tap must be one of the strangest successes in cinematic history. It’s a mockumentary about a fictional band that has met with so much success that it has effectively become a real band. It is widely lauded as one of the best comedies ever made and unquestionably one of the greatest rock music movies. It was even the source of the “these go to 11” meme before the Internet was invented.

I don’t really listen to music much and I barely know anything about heavy metal. But you don’t need any of that to appreciate the sheer genius of this film. It purports to be a documentary covering the British band’s concert tour of the United States in 1982. As such, there are interviews of the band members as they talk about their origins and their music, scenes of them performing at gigs, travelling from one location to another or just chilling out, and wonderfully done retrospective footage of their past. Every bit of it is stupidly funny.

Going into the jokes too much threatens to spoil them but I feel obliged to point out some examples how incredibly well executed they are. The Stonehenge joke for example is telegraphed in advance so the audience already knows what is coming. But the faces the band members make as they realize what is going on just kills me all the same. My favorite character has to be Christopher Guest’s Nigel Tufnel who does both the “turn it up to 11” and the “lick my love pump” jokes. It’s his pitch perfect deadpan delivery that sells the jokes so effectively.

Of course, all of this works so well only because heavy metal is such an inherently bombastic genre of music for which visual spectacle, and all of the absurdities thereof, is such a vital component. The hair, the costumes, the album covers, the grimacing faces, the ridiculously tasteless lyrics etc. are ripe for mockery and satire. Plus there’s the fact that all three of the main actors who play the regular members of the band (since their drummers keep dying under mysterious circumstances) turn out to be remarkably competent musicians. Despite the ludicrousness of the performances, they are actually quite entertaining and fun to watch.

Browsing through the Wikipedia entry for this film, I was struck by how many real-life bands had great things to say about this film. It’s no great surprise that the fictional events depicted feel so real because they were drawn from a rich vein of real anecdotes and stories. Arguing with the manager, bandmates feuding because of a girlfriend, being musically brilliant but lacking in common sense, petty complaints about whether the bread in the dressing room looks right. It’s all in here in unflattering detail.

But it is heartening to see how well they react to a film that is after all making fun of their careers, their missteps and their pretensions. It’s surely a great sign of how fantastic this film is that the subjects that being mocked here almost universally love it. There’s a cogent self-awareness of the silliness of rock music on show here, but at the same time, the love of the genre still shines through.

Over the past half-year, I’ve watched and written about a fair number of films that are inarguably better than This is Spinal Tap. But I can’t think of another film that while fully deserving a respectable place in cinematic history, is as entertaining, funny and downright likable. I’d recommend that anyone who hasn’t already seen it to watch it as soon as possible. I can’t imagine anyone who wouldn’t love it.