There is little in the world more violent to your hearing than a drum set. I can attest to that fact from personal experience. Starting from a wee middle schooler on a janky kit and building out my skill and hardware into high school and throughout college, I played drums in too many bands to count. Stuffed into basements, tight rehearsal spaces, and cobbled practice rooms, playing bars, sweaty venues and ill-acoustic’ed house parties, the young musician that I was was nevertheless opposed to earplugs. It muffled the sound. Made it harder to sync with the rest of the rhythm section. Killed the raw unbridled thrash of it all. Of the sprawling army of musicians I have played with over the years, too many have adopted this same misguided mantra: earplugs just aren’t rock and roll.

My junior year of college, after playing the drums loudly and proudly for just over a decade, I blew out my left eardrum. You might have experienced temporary tinnitus before, that awful piercing ring one gets from standing in too-close proximity at a concert. Or bumpin’ n’ grindin’ under a thumping club amp. I had had that happen on countless occasions. But, given the elixir of time, it would always pass. This time though, it was infinitely louder and unceasing. The physical and mental pain was excruciating and terrifying. Hours turned into days turned into weeks and the piercing high-pitched horror remained.

I was trapped in a world of one. No one could understand how cruel and all-encompassing this sudden shift to everything in my world was. I couldn’t hear people over the sound of the shrieking, shrill, permanent note. It became hard to pay attention in class because it sounded like I had a mosquito in my ear that never went away. Silence became a distant memory. My only solace was the shower, where the patter of water masked that constant wail of a shattered eardrum.

I tried everything to make it go away, to no avail. I stepped away from playing music altogether, avoided loud events, quit smoking weed (it made me even more aware of the oppressive totality of the sound), and sought aid from hearing specialists, one of which told me that I had an autoimmune disease that would cause me to go fully deaf in time (this was not true). The truth was much simpler: I had paid too little attention to the impermanence of my youth and my body. I had taken my hearing for granted and now suffered the unrelenting agony of that hubris.

The shift in my hearing was life-altering. I fell into a deep depression as my grasp on life and the fleeting control that I commanded over it slipped away. I became borderline suicidal and drank heavily to escape the reality of the sonic cage I felt trapped in. To this day, the most informative and perhaps strangely comforting information I gathered came from seeking out online message boards and a community of people who suffered a similar affliction. While one of the hearing specialists told me that I would never regain the hearing that I had lost and that my tinnitus would never improve, I heard different stories on these message boards: that time may not heal all wounds, but that the human spirit is adaptable as hell, given enough time. It would, in a sense, just become a new normal.

Forgive the extremely long and extremely personal segue into my thoughts on Darius Marder’s Sound of Metal but I feel it would be insincere for me to speak about this movie without highlighting how deeply personal and triggering this movie was more for. I felt it reverberate in my very soul and connected with its tragedy on a level that probably few will: for better and for worse.

Riz Ahmed is Ruben, a no-holds-barred thrash drummer and one half of the experimental nu-metal group Blackgammon. Overlook the fact that their music is mostly noise, as acquired a taste as marmite, and see it instead as a salvation of sorts for the ex-addict Ruben and his partner in music and romance Lou (Olivia Cooke). Two broken people who put themselves back together in each other’s arms and songs, their music may be a cacophony of double-bass-pedal thumps and inaudible growls but the brief glimpse we see of their home life (shacked up in a studio-fitted RV like a touring Bonnie and Clyde) paints a very different picture: one that is almost shockingly nurturing and tender. This all comes crashing down when Ruben suddenly blows out his hearing, jeopardizing his future as a musician and his relationship with Lou. Worried that he might fall off the wagon, Ruben is thrust into a confusing and horrifying reassessment of who he is and who he may someday be.

Brought to life with a tour-de-force performance from Ahmed and transportive sound design fashioned to trap viewers in the muffled soundscape of its protagonist, Sound of Metal tracks Ruben’s transition into the deaf community in an emotional and thoughtful manner. The commitment to involving actual members of the deaf community (many of whom worked on and in the film) speaks to Marder’s desire to get it right and tell this story in an authentic and inclusive manner and that genuineness translates into a more rounded and evocative experience. Though Sound of Metal can slip towards heavy-handedness and melodrama at moments, the script from Marder (who shares a story credit with maestro of melodrama Derek Cianfrance) culminates in a perfectly subtle and soft-spoken conclusion that, while admittedly predictable, achieves the ultimate goal of understanding and acceptance while feeling like a sincere arc for its characters, chiefly Ruben.

Marder uses a subjective and empathetic approach to unspool Ruben’s journey with hearing loss, one that more-so than any other film that I am aware of defines the struggle of losing something which is so central to your identity and trying to battle your way back from that deeply personal but hard to define loss. Losing your hearing isn’t like losing a limb or even your sight but is equally permanent and life-changing. Though Blackgammon’s music may be a fortissimo clobber of sound, Ruben’s story is more akin to a power ballad, complete with its emotionally triumphant chorus and bittersweet but ultimately major key hook. As for me, I still sleep with a fan running to drown out the omnipresent hum of my busted eardrum but it doesn’t bug me anywhere near like it used to. I even still play the drums. Only with the thickest set of industrial earplugs you will ever see.

CONCLUSION: ‘Sound of Metal’ jams to a deeply personal and subjective track as audiences experience the isolation and trauma of hearing loss alongside an ex-addict drummer, played by a never-better Riz Ahmed. Having undergone a similar (if much milder) experience, I connected with the story on a deeply personal level.