DIO: Dreamers Never Die 2022 Movie Review Trailer Cast Crew

In the metal subculture of music, the late singer Ronnie James Dio can still be counted as the most beloved figure in the genre, which makes him ideal for a documentary. He was almost completely uncontroversial, which doesn't necessarily bode well for such treatment. The guy who popularized the so-called "devil horns" hand gesture wasn't a demon. He just put one on MTV, or at least enjoyed dragging the sinister imagery, even if in real life he looked like a friendly kid from upstate New York who had made it big with a penchant for vaguely mystical imagery and a mountain. Life-size voice that could fill the largest halls.

“Dio: Dreamers Never Die,” the latest in a series of mostly unassuming, effective rock documentaries produced by BMG, doesn't present his subject as a particularly tortured or even complicated guy. It may be the most drug-free documentary ever made about a preeminent figure in hard rock (although a line of coke does make a cameo in the archive footage). But Dio had enough curious turns in his career to justify the length of the movie that has been made about him. Don Argott and Demian Fenton's film belongs more in the realm of fanservice than crossover image, but it will appeal to curious souls from other corners of the rock world who don't mind the devil being in two hours of details.

Directors: Don Argott, Demian Fenton

Stars: Vinny Appice, Sebastian Bach, Geezer Butler

After making a name for himself in the 1970s in two other bands, Ritchie Blackmore's Elf and Rainbow, the singer truly became the toast of the metal world when he was asked by Black Sabbath to replace the recently fired Ozzy Osbourne in 1979, for what ended up being a short but essential chapter in his career. The other members of Sabbath wanted someone more stable than Ozzy, to put it in terms of the understatement of the decade, and they sure got that in Dio, the total Gallant of Osbourne's Goofus. A clown price was replaced by a gentleman leader who, after all, would rather retire to his mansion than shut down the pubs. It didn't hurt that Dio was probably the most naturally talented singer of his chosen genre, at least if you prefer your tales of dragons and fate operatically sung from on high, not growled at a brimstone level.

Dio, who died abruptly from late-diagnosed cancer in 2010, is generally remembered as one of rock's greatest superstars. That didn't stop him from having a very healthy ego, so there's plenty of band rotation history to cover along the way, dating back to the '50s. After a current introduction by wife and manager Wendy Dio (also an executive producer of the film), "Dreamers Never Die" goes back in time for its first and most delicious surprise: the revelation that before he was a god, he was the square. Bold-looking trumpeter and skillful singer in a series of post-rockabilly bands, then a bit of a counterculture type, before Deep Purple's pre-metal "heavy rock" turned its head. Seeing and hearing him in these early groups is like seeing early "historic" footage of Spinal Tap sailing around in the '60s as flower children.

This won't be the last time you think of "This Is Spinal Tap." It's hard to imagine that the creators of that sitcom weren't influenced at least a little by Dio's act, even if it wasn't until later in the '80s that it became a nightly habit to wield a prop sword and kill a 13 feet. , laser-eyed dragon on the arena stages every night.

Least likely to find any of this a little silly is super-fan Jack Black, who gave his ultimate hero Dio a delightful musical-comedy cameo in 2006's "Tenacious D in the Pick of Destiny" and get effusive here. All of the media voices heard in the film are also metalhead worshipers, like hard rock radio jock Eddie Trunk, who makes a revealing comment at the end of the film when discussing the stage show full of props from Dio: "Every time Ronnie killed that dragon, that was what heavy metal is all about: authenticity."

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