Spinal Tap 2 might not go to 11, but it still rocks.

“It’s such a fine line between stupid and, uh … ” opines David St. Hubbins (Michael McKean) in Rob Reiner’s epochal 1984 mockumentary This Is Spinal Tap. In a rare instance of being less slow-witted than his bandmate, Nigel Tufnel (Christopher Guest) steps in to supply the missing adjective: “clever.” Forty-one years later, the fictional hard-rock supergroup is back to toeing that line in Spinal Tap II, with Reiner once more at the helm and Harry Shearer joining McKean and Guest by returning as bassist Derek Smalls, the self-described “lukewarm water” between the sparring guitarists’ “fire and ice.” Knowing that the band is back together, with a few new songs to add to the pantheon of such hits as “Sex Farm” and “Gimme Some Money,” can’t help but be extra-loud music to the ears of anyone who grew up with This Is Spinal Tap on repeat in both their living rooms and their brains.

That movie’s enduring popularity—it’s routinely included on lists of the all-time best film comedies, and sometimes on lists of the all-time best films, period—proves that you don’t have to be of the generation that watched it upon release to be able to quote it by heart. But as someone who was a teenager when it came out and found it perhaps the funniest movie I had ever seen, I can lay claim to being a Tap originalist. I didn’t realize at the time that Spinal Tap the band had preceded Spinal Tap the movie by several years: McKean and Guest, friends and collaborators since they met in college in the 1960s, created the band for a one-song sketch on a TV comedy special in 1979. Reiner, who appeared on the same show in the guise of celebrity DJ Wolfman Jack, thought highly enough of the ersatz British metal gods that he made them the subject of his directorial debut five years later. The mockumentary was not a brand-new form—in 1978, the made-for-TV movie All You Need Is Cash had poked similar fun at the Beatles via a fake band known as the Rutles—but it was Spinal Tap’s massive success on home video, and the brilliance with which it spoofed the rock and rockumentary clichés of its time, that made faux documentary the arguably too-ubiquitous comedy genre it’s become.

Maybe it’s because of that now-overfamiliar format that, from the jump, Spinal Tap II feels less urgent than its predecessor. There is also the fact that, over the past 40 years in the fictional Spinal Tap–verse, Tap has become a beloved classic-rock act, spoken of with reverence—and, as we’ll get to, sometimes jammed along with—by luminaries like Paul McCartney and Elton John. (The participation of these real-life rock legends is perhaps no surprise when you consider that the original film has spent the intervening decades in regular rotation on tour buses.) The first movie showed us the band as a pack of already-aging rockers struggling to hang on to their relevance while reduced to opening for children’s puppet shows; now that they can effortlessly fill a stadium while enjoying the esteem of their most successful peers, what worlds are left for the band to conquer?

This new movie, co-written, like the first, by Reiner, McKean, Guest, and Shearer, never quite answers that question, but it more than earns its 84 minutes of running time (two minutes longer than the original) thanks to the cast’s still-sharp powers of improvisation and songcraft. The soundtrack includes a lineup of new and old songs, all written and performed by the actors, whose musicianship alone lifts the rehearsal and performance scenes above similar moments in many a non-spoof rock biopic.

Spinal Tap II’s premise is that, because of a contractual debt the musicians owe to their new manager (Kerry Godliman), the band must reunite to play one last stadium show in New Orleans. After a feud whose cause remains unclear until the movie’s final scenes, David and Nigel have not spoken in 15 years, and all three band members have fallen out of touch. None of them is living like a king, but they’ve all found relative stability and fulfillment. David is a freelance composer who specializes in hold music; showing off his home studio to returning director Marty DiBergi (Reiner), he proudly plays the theme that won him a “Holdie.” Derek is the owner and proprietor of a museum specializing in the history of glue. And Nigel—true to his projection, back in the first movie, that he could see himself ending up as some sort of shopkeeper—runs a quaint small-town business called Guitars and Cheese, where those two commodities can be either purchased or exchanged via barter.

When the Tap boys reunite in a rented rehearsal space in New Orleans, both they and we are startled by how old they’ve gotten (and to their credit, the still-spry threesome of McKean, Guest, and Shearer are game to look far more enfeebled than they do in real life, via unflattering wigs and makeup and an impressive array of hideous shirts). It takes them a few sessions to get back in the groove, especially with an intrusive new publicist (Chris Addison) forever popping in with ideas that are literally tone-deaf: He suffers from a disorder that makes him unable to hear music.

The first order of business is to find a new drummer, given that percussionists for the band have a long history of mysterious deaths; asked how many drummers they’ve lost now, Nigel proffers a figure from what’s become the first movie’s most quoted line: “11.” After considering candidates that include the Roots’ Questlove and Metallica’s Lars Ulrich, they finally hire Didi Crockett (Valerie Franco), a bleach-blond punk firebrand with an irrepressibly upbeat attitude. Franco, a real-life professional drummer and music podcaster, is a wonderful find who should have been given more comic material to work with. In one of the movie’s least funny moments, she gets hit on by Derek just moments before introducing the band to her girlfriend. The joke is intended to be on Derek, not Didi, and there’s thankfully no homophobic humor upon the reveal that the band’s new member is gay, but the script seems to underestimate how poorly such a gag reflects on a male character in the post-#MeToo era; it’s hard to feel the same about the usually gentle, Ringo-like Derek after he’s come on to his brand-new colleague in their workplace. It’s one of the few moments when the movie itself, rather than the rock machismo it’s sending up, seems stuck in the sexual politics of the past.

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The movie’s best scenes by far come when the band is just sitting around noodling, arguing about chord changes or singing an old folk tune in three-part a cappella harmony. These scenes’ improvisatory looseness, the way they make wasting time into a virtue, sometimes put me in mind of Get Back, Peter Jackson’s sprawling documentary about the Beatles’ rehearsal sessions for Let It Be. In the decades since the first movie, Spinal Tap has continued to play and tour intermittently as a band, with the result that the principals now understand their characters, and themselves as performers, better than they did in 1984. In addition to dusting off the classics from the first movie, the soundtrack includes some songs from the 1992 Tap album Break Like the Wind. Tap superfan McCartney drops in to play along with the boys on “Cups and Cakes” (the B-side to “Gimme Some Money”), while Elton John provides more than a cameo, joining the band both in the rehearsal room and for the climactic concert performance. A photo shoot in a cemetery inspires the ever-philosophical Derek to grapple with his mortality by writing a new song, the memorably titled “Rockin’ in the Urn.”

Spinal Tap II’s scanty, improvisation-based script means that the story is short on suspense or forward movement; this is a gentle, nostalgic collection of sketches that riff on a four-decade-long experiment in musical and comic collaboration. Many of the press appearances the director and cast have been making in character are as funny as, or funnier than, the jokes captured on-screen here. But though it never reaches the heights of the original—if that film went to 11, this one tops out at around 7.5—Spinal Tap II also never feels like a soulless cash grab or a betrayal of the first movie’s impish comic spirit. In the closing moments of the 1984 film, McKean’s character is asked to write his future epitaph; after a solemn pause, he suggests “Here lies David St. Hubbins—and why not?” If you’re not a hardcore Tap-head, there might not be a reason this is a must-see, but all these years later, with the band still rocking and no epitaphs necessary, why not?

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