Jason Newstead, bassist for Metallica since Cliff Burton was killed in the late eighties, has just walked, and it's probably fair to say that the remaining three are a tad worried that anyone else might take to the road.

These therapy sessions initially seem like something of an inconvenience for all involved, but soon mutate, evolving into a bout of fuck-flinging theatrics, drummer Lars Ulrich screaming into the face of a comically nonplussed James Hetfield, the ever-amusing frontman.

Lars Ulrich, in fact, emerges as something of a selfish shit, if an understandable one. His whining tantrums seem all the misguided in China when the focus of the abuse is Hetfield, himself entering a years worth of rehab during the film on account of the alcoholism nurtured since back when Metallica where still intending to call their debut record Metal Up Your Ass.

It's easy to see Ulrich's point, his frustration at the noon-till-four recording times imposed by Hetfield's recovery, but it's also easy to see him as a fella exhibiting a baffling lack of compassion or thought for anything but the commercial future of the band.

As someone who has been, and still is, recovering from the old "Ale-ism", though, I find myself exhibiting some kind of deep admiration for Hetfield, his steadfast refusal to allow these ongoing tensions and bickerings to nudge him off that old wagon what is ever so mythologized.

Guitarist Kirk Hammet emerges as a highly-sensitive, soft-spoken mediator, retreating from the searing testosterone for to wander around his horse-ranch.

The film approaches and exploits a voyeuristic intensity that at times renders much of the action deeply uncomfortable. Ulrich's meeting with one-time member Dave Mustaine, now frontman for multi-million selling upstarts Megadeth, is particularly near-the-knuckle. It's also rather surprising to discover that despite the stratospheric success of his own outfit, Mustaine is constantly battling with his perceived standing as "Second-Best".

At times these adolescent episodes are all the amusing in the world, these fully-grown multimillionaires exhibiting the emotional maturity of particularly maladjusted eight-year-olds, but often the rawness of it all invites little but shock, or stunned empathy.

For a band so vigilant in the flaunting of their own machismo, Some Kind Of Monster is a remarkably risky prospect. It's fine for, say, Jonathan Davis of KoRn to rant and rave for the duration of his first-person diatribes against bullies, parents, the world, but even when Metallica voiced similar concerns in the likes of Fade To Black, a particularly bleak offering from their second record, it still seemed like a fantasy, an example of the band telling a story that had little relation to their own existence.