Movie Nation

In a streaming universe where whole channels are devoted to music documentaries, it’s inevitable that almost any band you an think of, any band anybody cares about, is going to merit a film telling their story.

Many of these films are “Behind the Music” formulaic, with the odd variation on a theme. Anvil never made it, for instance.

But “The Sound of Scars,” which tells the story of Life of Agony (LOA), stands out by telling us the story of its lead singer’s transition, from tortured and sometimes even suicidal Keith Caputo, to Mina Caputo, who she is today.

This transition happened just as they were about to break big. And the film’s story arc follows takes us from replacing their singer, to bringing her back as Mina, with struggles and triumph and a refreshing level of acceptance from their fans if not the entire hardcore scene.

The members — Caputo, guitarist Joey Zampella (Joey Z), bassist Alan Robert and recent-replacement drummer Veronica Bellino — tell tales of enduring “Raging Bull” childhoods in Brooklyn (Caputo and Zampella are cousins), where alcohol, abuse and violence were a part of daily life.

The founding cousins got their starts as roadies for other Biohazrd, which played in their local metal club L’Amour, where stage-diving and “letting out (testosteroned teen) aggression on each other” with stage diving, crowd-surfing and brawls were very much a part of that cacophonous scene.

When they formed Life of Agony, with songwriter/bassist Alan Robert coming up with the name, they staked out a more melodic, possibly even radio-friendly corner of hardcore. They still had an audience member die during a show there, and spent time in court over that calamity.

Had Caputo not wrestled with “the genderlessness of life,” and eventually quit to come out and reconcile the fact that “I’d always been feminine,” even in their most rough-and-tumble days, that accidental yet inevitable consequence of violent mosh pits (“Pitting” as Joey puts it.) might have been the focus of this film. It’s all “Somebody tried to steal my sneakers” crowd-surfing fun until the ambulances show up.

Perhaps a future Pearl Jam doc will take on that.

Director Leigh Brooks, who also did a Terrorvision-on-tour doc, interviews band members, record company folks and at one point has Robert’s parents (a lot less “Raging Bull” than the Zampella/Caputos, apparently) unironically read Alan’s bleak lyrics from the back cover of one of their LPs for a “Steve Allen Show” era laugh. As music docs go, “Scars” is almost entirely reliant on one “hook” Otherwise, the range of interviews is too narrow, the entertainment value limited.

But Mina’s journey has been an interesting one and the band is very much a big deal, as Rolling Stone referred to their debut LP, “River Runs Red,” as one of the great metal albums. And the title of their latest, which also gives the name to this film, points to exactly what this troubled journey to triumph is — “The Sound of Scars.”

Rating: unrated, profanity, violence, discussions of drug abuse, suicide, adult subject matter

Cast: Mina Caputo, Joey Zampella, Alan Robert, Veronica Bellino

Credits: Directed by Leigh Brooks. A Cinedigm release.

Running time: 1:30

This is the golden age of binge watching and streaming series. But I find the storytelling cliffhanger formulaic. And reviewing series is time consuming, and the reviews typically have no shelf life.

So I try not to invest in many of those.

But Mr. “Baby Driver,” Tony in “West Side Story” as an American reporter on the Japanese underworld? I’m setting aside the time for that.

Japan remains the most exotic of locales, a manga distillation of east meets west with distinct imprints on sports, romance, sex, gambling, gangsterism and cuisine.

HBO Max, you have our attention.

Michael Bay and Gyllenhaal and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II and Eiza Gonzalez…April 8.

An Italian period piece/fantasy of romance, treasure, pistols and crabs. This one opens April 15.

Oscilloscope has “The Tale of King Crab,” and you know how I feel about them.

A mushroom expert bonds with a runaway he meets in the woods collecting mushrooms in “The Issue with Elvis,” a milder-than-mild-mannered family drama set in wild, wonderful West Virginia.

The drama is low-key/low-stakes, the pace is leisurely and the dialogue bland to inane in this All-in-the-Wincott-Family production.

Canadian character actor Jeff Wincott leaves his martial arts behind, but not his Canadian dipthongs, as retired academic mycolist Dr. Mercer, a man living alone in the woods outside of Morgantown but still able to rattle off Latin names and long lists of medicinal/culinary properties of assorted fungi on sight.

He’s not seeing nearly as much of his most treasured varieties in his corner of the woods. It turns out there’s this kid (Wolfgang Wincott) out there harvesting as well. Mercer barters for some of the kid’s mushrooms, and soon they develop a little system — food for fungi.

But no kid should be living in the woods, or the edge of them, in late winter. Mercer’s curiosity is piqued when the boy finally starts talking. The kid gives his name as “Elvis,” named after “Costello,” not Presley, he insists. And as the good doctor takes an interest he takes him in.

In between discourses on mushrooms, how you only harvest “half” from the tree so that it’ll come back, about life, religion and “modern medicine,” Mercer finds time to make some calls as he tries to figure out what to be with a runaway with a made-up name.

And that’s about all there is to this inoffensive, innocuous and dramatically-flat film by Jeff Wincott’s wife and Wolfgang Wincott’s mother. It’s not particularly interesting, and the performances do nothing to animate it.

The shot selection isn’t the best, the one pointless instance of juggled hand-held footage feels amateurish and in low-light, the shortcomings of whatever gear they used to record “Elvis” stands out.

It’s also worth pointing out that Charlotte Wincott started out as an academic neuroscientist before taking up movie making. Their son will hopefully experience a similar search for a true calling, as acting doesn’t appear to be it. Leaving your kids’ stumbling line-readings (almost every line) and awkward, coached gestures in the finished film isn’t exactly a confidence booster.

Rating: unrated, some profanity

Cast: Jeff Wincott, Wolfgang Wincott

Credits: Scripted and directed by Charlotte Wincott. A Random media release.

Running time: 1:28

Film and the culture it reflects tends towards gross oversimplifications. When a terrible crime happens, we want it explained. We want to know what “triggered” this person, what made them “finally snap.”

The truth is always muddier, more complicated. Sometimes, some disturbed people are repeatedly, almost constantly “triggered.” It’s just the last and worst incident forces us to put it all together, to “see the signs.”

For Nitram, it could be a lawnmower that won’t start, being told that he can’t/shouldn’t set off fireworks at a nearby school during recess or even a suggestion that he cut his unkempt hair that sets him off.

“Nitram” is a tense thriller about a mass shooting whose edge-of-your-seat suspense comes from the viewer’s dread and growing alarm at how “off,” angry and unmanageable its subject plainly is. What will set off the title character, played with dead-eyed, hair-trigger intensity by Caleb Landry Jones, next? And how bad will it be?

“Nitram” spelled backwards is “Martin,” the filmmakers’ way of giving themselves a little distance from the worst mass shooting in Australian history, and a bit of fictional latitude in depicting it. The murderer’s name is Martin Bryant.

Director Justin Kurzel (“Assassin’s Creed”) reteams with his “True History of the Kelly Gang” screenwriter Shaun Grant to show us a developmentally-disabled child with dangerous tendencies who grew up as a medicated, almost unmanageable son lacking empathy, impulse control or a rational way of approaching any problem that confronted him.

He’s in his mid 20s when he threatens to run away. Again. His weary mother (Judy Davis) is sanguine about that.

“He’ll be back. No one else can live with that boy but us.”

There’s conflict in the house about regulating the son’s behavior. His mother still makes attempts at reining him in. His dad (Anthony LaPaglia) gives him more leeway just to limit the meltdowns.

The kid’s mania for fireworks began in childhood where we see him interviewed on television with other kids in a burn ward.

“You think you’ll be playing with firecrackers again,” the reporter wants to know? After all, he’s had skin grafts and suffered great pain.

“Yes,” the tween tells her. No “lesson learned.” He’s hooked and he cannot fathom the idea of consequences.

The adult he grows up into gets disability payments from the state and regular healthcare visits to a troubled shrink. Nitram drifts from passion to passion. He was into scuba diving. Now he’s all set to become a surfer. But he can’t earn enough extra to pay for a board, as he can’t even get a driver’s license.

So the social-signals-missing adult with the long, stringy hair and scary intensity sets off, door to door, trying to earn money mowing lawns. The neighbors, many of whom scream at him about the fireworks thing, have to ask the frankly-creepy guy to remove his foot from their doorway to close it on him. His sales pitch is blunt to the point of rude.

Yet the flighty, Gilbert & Sullivan-addicted oddball down the road, Helen (Essie Davis) takes him on. She has a constantly-spinning record player and a house full of dogs, and tells him “You look like a movie star.” His behavior around her seems calm enough, until we see what he does when somebody else is driving, until the target-practice with his air rifle comes to her yard.

And no, his “I just get sad sometimes” isn’t a real explanation.

Kurzel and Grant blend in story points from the real shooting and its prologue with fictional speculation and cinematic simplification. There was a B & B that dad had his heart set on buying so that their son could help them run it, and both parents could be there to “keep an eye” on him and regulate his behavior.

Jones, of “Three Billboards” and “Get Out,” mastered the Aussie accent of this Tasmanian killer, and gives a performance that could make one and all mutter, “Well, we saw that coming.”

Just casting the two-time Oscar-nominee Davis as his mother renders the woman bitter, brittle and resigned to the life sentence giving birth to him gave her.

One fraught scene has the son try to deliver some sort of “tough love” to his father, who turns morose, refusing to get up and get dressed after the lifeline that purchasing Seascape B & B is yanked from him. It’s a brutal moment, and we wonder if this is something the kid’s parents tried on him early on, to no avail.

And there’s the soul-sucking amorality of a “no worries,” just-make-big-sale gun dealer, who lets the lack of a firearm license slide with an “Awright, nooo dramas” as he arms this Tasmanian sociopath to the teeth.

It was always going to be a chilling, emotionally deflating film. Kurzel and Grant double-down on that by not showing the murders and not focusing on the victims. And they finish it off with a coda that doesn’t let the way this slaughter impacted Australian society get sugar-coated, the way it’s often discussed in the US.

There are people among us who are “triggered” without even trying. And if the wrong politicians get a say, there’s no keeping machine guns out of the country or out of their trigger-happy hands.

Rating: unrated, violence

Cast: Caleb Landry Jones, Judy Davis, Anthony LaPaglia, Essie Davis.

Credits: Directed by Justin Kurzel, scripted by Shaun Grant. An IFC release.

Running time: 1:51

The latest film from the writer director of “A Prophet,” “Rust and Bone” and “The Sisters Brothers” is a menage a quatre romance.

This one, titled “Les Olympiades” in France, opens on North America April 15.

Downbeat, infuriating, reluctant to give up its mystery and illogical and anticlimactic by its finale, “Compartment No. 6” parks us in a Russian train for a long journey from Moscow to Murmansk with two intriguingly mismatched traveling companions.

It might be dismissed as one of those Cannes Award winners destined to be forgotten not long after the fizz on the champagne has bubbled out. But grasping for meaning in its unsettling, occasionally comic and always cryptic “relationship” can be an interesting thought exercise.

At a vague point in time after “Titanic” and before Putin, a just-jilted gay college student and a hatefully boorish and drunken Russian mine-worker get off on the wrong foot and yet must endure one another for days of infuriating, fraught and occasionally comical interactions as they rumble north in the late Russian winter.

Chainsmoking, aggressive and bottle-emptying Ljoha (Yuriy Borisov) seems somewhere far down the obnoxious/dangerous spectrum. He’s bad enough that I wondered for a few minutes if he wasn’t going to wind up dead with the Finnish woman — who I never heard called “Laura” (Seidi Haarla) — as the suspect.

He is that insistently awful. She is that anxious to get out of there, change compartments, go down a class in accommodations or even exit the train.

But there is no going back to Moscow, where she’s been studying at the university, destined to be just another “houseguest” of the charming, sophisticated and sexy older academic Irina (Dinara Drukarova).

Loutish Ljoha staggers into the sitting/sleeping berth, fills a glass out of a fresh bottle, and instantly misreads the situation, starting in with scores of questions. Whatever she’s doing, documenting the trip to see “the petroglyphs” (ancient stone carvings) outside of the Arctic Ocean seaport of Murmansk by camcorder, collecting her thoughts or reading, he is a Russian male in his cups and will not be ignored.

“You look so serious all the time,” he says (in Russian with subtitles). “You’ll get old too soon...wrinkles.”

He’s hitting on her. She isn’t having it. And he won’t stop. Her Russian isn’t entirely fluent, but when she finally lets him engage, she gives rude, obscene mistranslations for his inane “How do you say?” queries about Finnish.

North American viewers might be puzzled that she’d engage with him at all. But director and co-writer Juho Kuosmanen, adapting a novel by his fellow Finn Rosa Liksom, forces us into her shoes — a gay foreign woman trapped in this situation, with no lifeline from the rude Russian porter, rude waiters in the dining car or instantly-moved-on lover back in Moscow.

“You think I’m a bad guy?”

“I only know what I see.”

It’s probably a mistake to read too much into the geopolitical metaphor that seems all the more obvious since Russia invaded Ukraine, which happened a year after “Compartment No. 6” was the toast of a pandemic-depleted Cannes, almost two years after it was made.

But Russia has always been Russia, even with that ’90s interlude when the world hoped it might outgrow its belligerent, vodka-soaked adolescence. And Finland’s relationship with the Bear next door has always been perilous.

Even that, coupled with a scorned woman’s softening to the abrasive “any port in a storm” jerk she’s been thrown together with, is a hard sell. I never bought that, gritted my teeth at every fresh rapprochement and took on a little extra concern for this young woman giving anything like encouragement to the bully she’s clearly paired up with.

As others are stuffed into the compartment for this or that leg of the journey, does he really seem less toxic by comparison? Even the incessant guitar-playing of a clingy, instantly-over-familiar Finnish tourist feels like a welcome respite.

Still, the stark, grey ugliness of just-post-Soviet Russia is immersive, and the grace notes — friendly mechanics offering a bottle, a slowly-softening porter, a near heroic effort to help Laura complete her quest (treated as an anticlimax) — give us something to cling to in “Compartment No. 6.”

No, Cannes didn’t discover the “new Aki Kaurismäki” (“Leningrad Cowboys Go America”) with this film. But Kuosmanen hopefully has an entire career ahead of him to make this Cannes-honored fluke a mere stepping stone to acclaim he might eventually deserve.

Rating: R for language and some sexual references

Cast: Seidi Haarla, Yuriy Borisov

Credits: Directed by Juho Kuosmanen, scripted by Andris Feldmanis and Juho Kuosmanen, loosely based on a novel by Rosa Liksom. A Sony Pictures Classics release.

Running time: 1:47

A hit novel? This comes to the screen this July.

This looks topical, in that “Handmaid’s Tale” sort of way, men engineering a pushback against moment over grievances real or imagined.

Looks seriously spooky, and May 20 we see just how spooky.