Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Hate To Love: Nickelback’ on Netflix, A Doc That Tracks The Band’s Success In The Midst Of “You Suck!” Chants 

They’ve been wrong, they’ve been down, been to the bottom of every bottle. But after over 25 years, are they having fun yet? In Hate to Love: Nickelback, we find out where the Canadian rockers came from, what they think about being a perennial target of cancel culture, and whether the haters even matter when the fans who do like their shit are still coming out to shows. Hate to Love features extensive interviews with Nickelback members Chad Kroeger, Mike Kroeger, Ryan Peake, and Daniel Adair, their families, and the occasional music peer. (Billy Corgan, anyone?) Directed by Leigh Brooks, the doc made its debut at the 2023 Toronto International Film Festival.

HATE TO LOVE – NICKELBACK: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT? 

The Gist: One does not simply ‘like Nickelback’. On one hand, becoming a main character of the Boromir meme means social media found you, and it’s got a hot take. But on the other, isn’t that kind of a badge of honor? For the members of Nickelback – singer, guitarist, and principal songwriter Chad Kroeger, rhythm guitarist Ryan Peake, bass player (and Chad’s brother) Mike Kroeger, and drummer Daniel Adair – haterade has not dulled their ability to sell 50 million records, get nominated for Grammys, and be inducted by Ryan Reynolds into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame. And as Hate to Love unfolds, getting canceled by YouTubers and dismissed by music critics becomes just a part of Nickelback’s ongoing story, which is an otherwise pretty straightforward rock ‘n’ roll journey.

Hanna, Alberta, Canada. It was the early 1980s, and Chad Kroeger was in his bad kid phase. (“He was either on his way to it or from it,” mom Debbie Sullivan says.) But Chad and his brother Mike found music, recruited local guitar player Ryan Peake, borrowed money to make a demo, and started playing a series of godawful rooms wherever people would book them. Grainy VHS live footage from this era reveals a band that had already coalesced around Chad Kroeger’s flair for big vocals and a blend of Metallica-style aggression with the melodic reach of Alice in Chains, and soon enough they’d built a following and secured a record deal. In Hate to Love, the guy who signed them says it was precisely because their songs sounded arena rock-ready. And in 2001, “How You Remind Me” happened on a global level.

Nickelback became a thing when radio play and music videos still mattered as avenues to break new music. So by the 2010s and the rise of social media, they could be viewed as both an anachronism and too big for their britches. Where did this group who played populist butt rock with lyrics that dismissed female agency get off trying to stay relevant? Hate to Love unpacks this a bit, and there are acknowledgements that it gets to them. (“Nobody picks up a guitar to be in the most hated band in the world,” Peake says.) But Nickelback also credits their core fans, “who don’t give a shit what other people think,” and some of these Nickel-stans are featured in first-person testimonials. Throw in a few intraband health scares, the COVID era, and a hiatus, and they’re right back to putting out records and playing shows. “We’re in a weird spot not many bands find themselves in. Nickelback lifetime achievement award for not going away.” Take that, haters.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of? While it does address their standing as a band that’s easy to loathe, Hate to Love: Nickelback is otherwise a pretty conventional rock doc, tracking the group’s rise, the adversity they’ve faced, and their next chapter. (A recent example of this format is Hulu’s Thank You, Goodnight, about rock veterans Bon Jovi.). But as a touchpoint for Nickelback as pop cultural laughing stock, you could also point to something like the stoner comedy series Chad & JT Go Deep. Comedian and actor Tom Allen – he’s the owner of Mitch’s Beignets in Barry – took “Chad Kroeger” as his stage name because as a bit, it writes itself.  

Performance Worth Watching: Shout-out to the wives and children of the married members of Nickelback, who are out here on the streets defending their husbands and dads from continued vitriol. Seems like something they shouldn’t have to do, but social media’s gonna social media.   

Memorable Dialogue: “‘Cause we all just wanna be big rockstars/And live in hilltop houses driving 15 cars/The girls come easy, and the drugs come cheap/We’ll all stay skinny ‘cause we just won’t eat.”  It’s weird to hear a song you completely forgot about, and Nickelback’s “Rockstar” is that song. Released in 2005, “Rockstar” felt trite then, like a thin glaze off Offspring’s 1998 hit “Pretty Fly (For a White Guy),” and chances are good today’s culture has even less bandwidth for this kind of novelty hit.

Sex and Skin: “I’m not the first person to say something a little risqué in a song,” Chad Kroeger says in Hate to Love, and he’s not wrong. Then again, this is also his way of justifying lowest common denominator lyrics like “You’re so much cooler when you never pull it out/’Cause you look so much cuter with something in your mouth.” 

Our Take: With its title, Hate to Love: Nickelback positions itself as a doc about a band that has existed inside some kind of decades-long identity crisis. But in the grand Nickelbackian scheme of things, the cheap laugh memes and shouty YouTube debates that fueled this supposed crisis aren’t relevant, and really too ephemeral to build an entire documentary around. Which is probably why Hate to Love doesn’t. Sure, that stuff is in here – Ryan Peake calls the empty criticism unfair, and other members observe how it always hit Chad Kroeger harder because he’s the face and voice of the band. But it’s basically a blip, and really has more to do with the reality of Nickelback’s lifecycle. They were part of a crop of post-grunge bands who broke big around the same early 2000s time, a wave of acts signed to major labels in the wake of alternative and grunge who were often competing to sound louder but exactly the same. Nickelback took that huge guitar sound, added hooks, and streamlined rage for an appeal to audiences who wanted to high-five each other at arena shows without having to think too hard about what they were hearing. Once the memes started flying, a lot of it was because Nickelback were the only band of their crop still standing. The real story in Hate to Love isn’t about how one does not simply like Nickelback. It’s about how these guys are still around and playing arenas instead of local rib fests and nostalgia tours.

Our Call: STREAM IT, especially if you’re one of the die-hard Nickel-stans out there. But for everyone else, it’s not about superficial jabs on social media. This documentary is how Nickelback reminds you who they really am. 

  

Johnny Loftus (@glennganges) is an independent writer and editor living at large in Chicagoland. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, All Music Guide, Pitchfork Media, and Nicki Swift.