If Metallica had a love of the absurd, you could accuse them of staging their sessions with band therapist Phil Towle as an attempt to make their own This Is Spinal Tap. But when Lars Ulrich starts fielding grievances from his longtime bandmates with couples-therapy mirroring — “What I hear you saying is…” — it’s no longer clear who the joke is on. Filmmakers Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky were only tapped for a making-of featurette, but when it became clear that one of the world’s biggest rock bands was in the midst of a collective existential crisis, they stuck around and captured an indelible record of the live-wire dynamics that make any creative enterprise work, and often doom them to failure. How good is Some Kind of Monster? It almost makes you want to listen to St. Anger again. —S.A.