Coming to a Jack-n-Coke most you lot. LEMMY Film LLC

If you sit downward to lookout Lemmy: 49% Motherf**ker, 51% Son of a Bitch—the new documentary about Lemmy Kilmister, the whiskey-guzzling, ii-pack-a-day-smoking, Rickenbacker-bass-playing frontman of Motörhead—expecting a VH1 Behind the Music–style exposé, you'll be sorely disappointed, especially if you get a text that says, "My friend'south sister once snorted a line of coke off Lemmy'southward cock!!!" 10 minutes in. Immoderacy is a staple of metalhead memoir, cheers to efforts similar Mötley Crüe's 2001 autobiography The Clay or that Backside the Music episode where Ozzy Osbourne admits to being so fucked-upwards he snorted ants off a sidewalk.

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Instead, filmmakers Greg Olliver and Wes Orshoski follow Lemmy for more than three years, recording bout footage and candid at-dwelling house interviews. This arroyo renders Lemmy a surprisingly human being story, one of a homo who's non only been a notoriously hard-livin' rocker for about 50 years (he joined his first band, the Rockin' Vicars, in 1965), but also very much a humble human being, and the rad dad y'all wished you had.

Built-in Ian Fraser Kilmister on Christmas Eve in 1945, Lemmy grew upwardly without a father ("[He was] a miserable little dickhead... All he ever did was walk out on me"), but he seems determined not to follow suit. In some other interview, the filmmakers ask what's the almost treasured possession in his cluttered apartment. "He is," he says, pointing to his son—clumsily sweet for the subject area of a movie with the tagline 49% Motherf**ker, 51% Son of a Bitch. (He later tells his son, "Promise me you won't practise coke. Do speed, information technology'due south better for you.")

When non on bout, Lemmy lives in a tiny two-bedroom near the Sunset Strip in Los Angeles because "the hire's just $900 a month" and it's close to the Rainbow—where he holds court, almost daily, in front of the video poker machine, drinking Jack-n-Cokes, signing autographs, and telling bad jokes ("How practise you brand a dead baby float? Two scoops of ice cream, two scoops of dead infant!").

In what's sure to exist one of the well-nigh controversial scenes in the motion-picture show, Lemmy shows off his collection of knives, swords, and uniforms—a room filled, floor to ceiling, with Nazi memorabilia. Subsequently, he explains away whatsoever potential accusations, stating—so earnestly it's hard not to believe him—that he'south had "v black girlfriends, and that'd surely make [him] a really bad Nazi."

The flick's principal fault is that both the filmmakers and the long list of interviewees—including Alice Cooper, Joan Jett, Slash, Metallica, Ozzy, Jarvis Cocker, and Ice-T—are such überfans of Motörhead that the whole thing slips into gushy, geeky hero worship. No one has a bad thing to say, except maybe his 2d band, Hawkwind (the "prog-rock band that punks liked"), which Lemmy was fired from after being arrested at the Canadian border for amphetamine possession.

Only it was Lemmy'south need for speed that gave nascence to Motörhead in 1975. "I remember the fourth dimension before rock 'n' whorl. All we had was Rosemary Clooney records. Then suddenly Trivial Richard came forth. It changed everything." Motörhead as well changed everything. They pretty much invented heavy metal, rivaling Black Sabbath. "If they'd said to me, 'Who would you say was the original metallic band?' it was a toss betwixt Lemmy and Black Sabbath—only I would say Motörhead," says Ozzy in one scene. Motörhead's sound—"speed freaks playing speed music"—also gave nascency to the more specific genre of thrash metal. Without them, we'd have no Metallica, no Anthrax, and no Slayer.

Maybe Lemmy's unflinching straightforwardness was the reason filmmakers were hard-pressed to get anyone to talk smack about the Kill-Meister—the undisputed Godfather of Metal. He's honest and unapologetic. He never married and continues to live a life of touring, drinking, and drugging—and refuses to brag about it. "I don't want kids to accept drugs 'cause of me. I also wouldn't tell them to stay off of drugs, but I don't want to annunciate the lifestyle that killed a lot of my friends." Somehow surviving himself, in 2011, Lemmy is notwithstanding unstoppable—a 65-year-old with high blood pressure, diabetes, and 35 years of Motörhead nether his bullet belt. In the last minutes of Lemmy, the interviewer asks what keeps him going. "You accept a dream when you're a kid. And my dream came true," he says. "Then why ever stop?" recommended

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