Watch the Heavy Metal in Baghdad trailer

For most of its history, the rock film has been the sole prerogative of a small elite of rock stars. From the Beatles’ A Hard Day’s Night in the 1960s to the recent Rolling Stones film Shine a Light, the big screen has had no place for the nobodies of rock’n’roll. Now, though, a new wave of rock documentaries is taking us backstage and into the lives of people and performers we’ve never heard of. Heavy Load is a new British film about a band called Heavy Load, who are billed as “the only disabled punk band in the UK”. Heavy Metal in Baghdad is about Acrassicauda, the only metal band in Baghdad. And there’s Nerdcore Rising, which features a nerdy white rapper called MC Frontalot and the computer obsessives who make up his fan base.

All three films are true-life stories about musical outsiders and social misfits who struggle to overcome the obstacles to their dreams of stardom. But are such films expanding the form of the rock doc by making a place for new and offbeat voices or simply creating an entertaining freak show, one that gives space to the kind of wannabes and one-flop wonders we know so well from reality television?

You can find the precursor of this new wave in the recent past. A seminal influence is Rob Reiner’s This Is Spinal Tap (1984). This faux documentary provided a backstage view of a band falling apart and into the abyss of failure. They were rock’s first lovable losers. Since then, the rock doc has become increasingly democratic, giving visibility and a voice to all sorts of unlikely people. There were the air-guitar fantasists and exhibitionists of Alexandra Lipsitz’s Air Guitar Nation (2006). The British director Stephen Walker’s Young at Heart (2007) gave us a choir of American senior citizens - average age 81 - who specialised in covering rock and punk classics. Along with air guitarists and aged rockers, we’ve had documentaries about damaged and self-destructive singers few had heard of: the manic-depressive songwriter Daniel Johnson, in Jeff Feuerzeig’s The Devil and Daniel Johnston (2005), and the disturbed self-proclaimed “genius” Anton Newcombe, who upstaged the more famous Dandy Warhols in Ondi Timoner’s 2004 documentary, DiG!

Jerry Rothwell’s Heavy Load follows the trend of giving a space to the people rock films prefer to ignore. In fact, only three of Heavy Load - the lead vocalist, Simon Barker, the guitarist, Jimmy Nichols, and the drummer, Michael White - have what are called “learning disabilities”. The film never makes clear what these difficulties are, but we can see that Michael suffers from Down’s syndrome and that all three band members are in residential care and attend daytime care centres.

Rothwell’s film follows the band as they try to move out of the ghetto of playing the disability circuit and into more mainstream venues such as pubs and festivals. As well as challenging our perception of the disabled, it examines what constitutes a real rock band. Are Heavy Load keeping the spirit of punk alive or are they a bunch of attention-seeking wannabes?

You might think that a Brighton-based band such as Heavy Load would have little in common with a Iraqi metal act such as Acrassicauda. But Heavy Metal in Baghdad shows this group of metal-mad young Iraqis struggling against a very different set of disabilities. They are trying to function in a dys-functional city. The film traces the band’s misfortunes following the overthrow of Saddam Hussein in 2003 to the rise of the insurgency in 2006, when 300 people a day were being killed. Acrassicauda’s music is the perfect soundtrack for a city descending into murder and mayhem. So, while Heavy Load battle against the petty restrictions that come with living in care, Acrassicauda face curfews, car bombs and death threats in a city where if band members go out to rehearse, they may never come back. Wear a Slipknot T-shirt and you could be murdered for being too Americanised. The band’s defiant attitude to all this can be summed up as: “Life sucks, but metal rocks.”

Like metal fans and the disabled, nerds are another group who are marginalised and mocked. Directed by Negin Farsad and Kim Gatewood, Nerdcore Rising follows MC Frontalot, known as the “godfather of nerdom”, on his first national tour. His handicap, as it were, is that he’s a bald, white nerd with glasses who sings about Star Wars conventions and computer viruses - not exactly the stuff that legends of rap are made of. Then we have the singer Dennis Lambert, a 60-year-old real-estate salesman from Florida, who is the subject of Of All the Things. In the 1970s and 1980s, he was a successful record producer, and is credited with co-writing one of the worst pop records of all time, Starship’s We Built This City. Directed by his son Jody, Of All the Things follows Lambert’s 2007 comeback tour of the Philippines, where his 1976 flop solo album, Bags and Things, was a big hit.

These are all rock films in which the music takes a back seat; they are personality driven mini-dramas. Still, Heavy Load call themselves “Brighton’s answer to the Ramones”, which is unfair to the Ramones. The band specialise in doing pop classics such as Wild Thing and Kylie’s Can’t Get You out of My Head - in a thrash-punk style. You get the feeling that for Heavy Load, music isn’t an art form but a kind of therapy. Heavy metal, meanwhile, offers a form of medication for Acrassicauda. “If I didn’t have metal, I’d probably kill somebody,” says one band member. They, too, do covers - mostly Metallica - but are a pretty mediocre metal band. So, are these really films about rock bands? If Acrassicauda didn’t face the horrors of Iraq, would anyone be interested in them or their music? I doubt it. This is essentially a war movie by other means.

A similar question hangs over Heavy Load. Do they owe their film debut to their music or to the fact that three band members are disabled? Rothwell insists, “It’s the story of a rock group that happens to be disabled.” When pushed, however, he concedes: “If they weren’t disabled, there wouldn’t be a story here. They’d be like a hundred other bands”. Yet the fact that the focus of these films is more on the people than the performances is a welcome return to the glory days of the rock doc, when DA Pennebaker’s Don’t Look Back was more about Dylan the man than Dylan the performer.

This new wave of rockumentaries reflects a shift in power from bands, who expect directors to make the film that will sell more records and maintain the legend, to directors, who are eschewing the usual film-of-the-concert format to tell more interesting stories. Rothwell believes the rockumentary has been in a bit of a creative rut. He is trying to bring back some of the authenticity and ambition the genre used to have. “I think films like Heavy Load and Heavy Metal in Baghdad are using rock music to explore wider issues such as disability and war,” he says. “The great rockumentaries of the past, such as Don’t Look Back and Gimmie Shelter, were about something more than music, they told a bigger story.”

Yet there is an interesting contradiction at the heart of these films. While the directors may be charmed by the sheer determination of these bands, and admire their outsider status, the bands themselves aren’t content with being lovable losers and nobodies. On the contrary, they want to be just like the very stars such films aren’t interested in. There is a moment in Heavy Load when the drummer, Michael, tells us: “I want to be famous on my own as a solo singer.” It would be a comic Spinal Tap moment, if only it weren’t such a hopeless dream.

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