Sound of Metal: Throbbing Eternity

There’s a lushness to this moment that can be achieved only on 35 mm film, as well as a rawness born of the fact that Ahmed and Cooke learned how to play their instruments and actually performed the song together as the cameras rolled. “Every single take was a live take,” without cutaways, Marder has said. Behind the drums, Ruben nods, leans forward, bounces, and finally begins to slam on the drumheads with everything he has—a whirling dervish riding high on the purity of his devotion. Cinematographer Daniël Bouquet shifts our perspective away from Ruben and toward Lou, whose scream permeates every corner of this little club. The lights strobe through a cycle of red, yellow, orange, and gold, and Bouquet allows Ruben and Lou to share the frame as they race toward the song’s climax on his thrashing percussion and her repeated staccato delivery of “Let me get there.”

When the cacophony ends, the stare between Ruben and Lou communicates something vital about the various aspects of their relationship: creative partnership as members of Blackgammon, cohabitation as lovers, and mutual care as people in recovery from self-destruction. Our worlds can get smaller as we grow older and become locked into our rhythms and patterns, and Ruben and Lou are each other’s everything. Their Airstream 345 RV is both their home and their recording studio, and Bouquet places his camera in its narrow corridor to peer into the bedroom where Ruben and Lou start each morning by dancing together to the Commodores’ “This Love” (“Time don’t wait for no one . . . Every minute’s got to count for something / You and I can be proud of”). Lou is Ruben’s lighthouse, Mecca, and North Star—sometimes less a person than an abstraction—and through a series of close-ups, we sense the stability he finds in the routines of caring for her: the coffee he brews for Lou, the fruit smoothie he makes for Lou, the breakfast he cooks for Lou. The conversations they have while driving from gig to gig are honest and open, and the Marders’ script buries allusions to the characters’ pasts within them: Ruben’s quietly heartbreaking jokes about how his missing father could be Jeff Goldblum; Lou’s daydreams about her own funeral, and her current desire to be cremated, turned into tattoo ink, and memorialized on Ruben’s body. A future without each other seems impossible, and the now they share appears to stretch into forever.

In the office of Raci’s Joe, a man who lost his hearing during the Vietnam War, tumbled into and climbed out of alcoholism, and now runs a house for Deaf people in recovery from addiction (the capitalization signifies that someone identifies as part of the Deaf community), Ruben and Lou discuss with Joe whether Ruben should join the program. The camera work is modest, and the light, falling into the room through the glass-paned door, is naturalistic. Yet the scene acts as a fulcrum for these characters, and Lou’s particular energy—her panic, her anxious silence—drives it. She says barely anything as the men—Joe inviting, Ruben defensive—size each other up, but the next day, Lou has made a decision, for herself and for Ruben. In their parting scene, her observation that, if he relapses, “I’ll hurt myself too,” is dagger-sharp, their mutual devotion now entwined with agony. Marder places us practically between the couple as they embrace and break apart, as their voices quaver and crack, as Lou caresses Ruben’s face and he doubles over in physical pain at their separation. Ahmed’s delivery of the line “You’re it for me, Lou. You’re my fucking heart . . . You gotta wait for me” is wounded and excruciating, but just as important in this scene is his vow: “I’ll fix this.” None of this will come to pass in the ways that Ruben expects, and the miasma of despair and presumption inside him is its own sort of oppression.

Masculinity is a maze of limitations and expectations imposed from within and without, and the second and third acts of Sound of Metal move deliberately through the otherness Ruben initially feels, the Deaf community of which he eventually becomes a part, and the decision he later makes that functions as a kind of betrayal, both of those in that community and of the person he was becoming. At the sober house, where Joe encourages Ruben to learn ASL (Ahmed studied the language for seven months in preparation) and embrace his new reality, Sound of Metal emphasizes both the isolation of Ruben’s point-of-hearing perspective and the community’s lively energy, holding the two in tension with each other to convey the vast spectrum of deaf and Deaf experiences. Ruben’s housemates, played by Deaf actors including Chelsea Lee and Shaheem Sanchez, have a group dinner that Ruben can’t participate in but that we hear as vibrant and raucous. The school for Deaf children that Ruben gets involved with as part of Joe’s program for him is full of curious, mischievous children who want to learn more about his tattoos and drumming skills. Their teachers are played by Deaf actors Lauren Ridloff and Jeremy Lee Stone, the latter of whom also served as Marder’s creative assistant and helped with the direction of the film’s Deaf actors.

Although Sound of Metal is purposefully vague about how much time Ruben spends in Joe’s program, it becomes clear that this way of life is not the tragedy Ruben originally perceived it to be. But neither does Marder romanticize or glorify it. “Here are Deaf people with the same foibles that hearing people have,” Raci has said of the film’s approach, and perhaps that in part explains why Ruben’s decision to undergo cochlear implant surgery, which drains his savings and fails to restore his hearing in the way he expected, feels so inevitable. The Ruben who shows Joe his S-shaped surgery scars with a mixture of sheepishness and pique looks and sounds “like an addict,” as Joe puts it; his substance of choice is the dream of continuing what Lou describes as “our little gypsy life together,” which can no longer exist. When a jittery, cynical Ruben leaves a teary-eyed Joe and the sober house behind, it’s in pursuit of a recovery that isn’t the one he needs.

“[It becomes] poisonous to us, and we poison ourselves,” Marder has said of the masculinity that drives Ruben and his need to “fix” whatever he can, and the specter of that burden hovers over Sound of Metal’s final minutes. The Ruben who sits on a park bench in Paris is the same man who made Lou the center of his life, and also the same man who realized that the answer to his concerned query “Who’s gonna be looking out for you over there?” was Lou herself, and also the same man who just decided to walk away from the woman he loves because she’s also the woman he hurts. The Ruben who now hears Lou’s delicate singing in French as dissonance and discord is the same man who remembers when she sang that way on purpose in English, when the noise they surrounded themselves with was a protective cocoon rather than an echo of a memory. And the Ruben who chooses to disconnect the processors from his implants, close his eyes, and find himself in silence isn’t engaging in an act of surrender but one of perseverance.

Who are we revealed to be when our expectations for ourselves fall away and we accept the person who remains? When the dreams of our past step aside for the unknowability of our future? Sound of Metal is a portrait of transformation measured by what is lost and what is found, what is given up and what is gained. The apotheotic stillness that Joe describes as the “kingdom of God” is waiting, and the next page of Ruben’s story is yet to be written.