Editor’s Note: Vanyaland Film Editor Nick Johnston is out in Park City, Utah, covering the 2024 Sundance Film Festival. Scan through our full coverage of Sundance reviews from this year’s festival as they go live, and check out our full archives of past editions.
Given their outsized influence on popular culture, it’s hard to believe that Devo only really existed as a force in mainstream music for the better part of six years. Of course, they were around a lot longer than that – the band formed in the aftermath of the Kent State massacre in 1970, when the group’s two figureheads, Mark Mothersbaugh and Jerry Casale, took the collaborative and playful artistic aspects of their friendship and applied it to a social movement/art collective that eventually became the band. And through the years, its members haven’t stopped making art, with Mothersbaugh going on to have an impressive career as a composer and Casale creating genuinely iconic advertising (the dude was responsible for all of those damn Tang ads millennials saw as kids), all while Devo have released new music this century and continue to tour the world fairly consistently, appearing regularly on the festival circuit before announcing a farewell tour for 2024.
Still, those six years in which Devo ruled the radio waves and helped to inaugurate MTV as a cultural force will continue to define them. They’re the Velvet Underground for a certain breed of music nerd: They listen to a Devo record, and next thing you know, they’re buying a Moog synthesizer, exploring the wild world of colored jumpsuits, and trying to figure out exactly how long they can sustain a single note at a local club before getting hit by a flying beer bottle. Chris Smith’s Devo acts as a kind of Hero With a Thousand Faces for that bizarre path to the top of the pops, where the “Too Rare to Live and Too Weird to Die” exist in the eternal unconscious miasma.
Smith’s film operates in two ways: the first is as a standard rock doc, in which talking head interviewees are cross-cut with concert footage and promotional materials, which is oftentimes fine until it starts to feel like Grampa Simpson is gathering the kids around for another story about Shelbyville’s lemons. The second manifests as a broad-scale attempt to replicate Bruce Conner’s style (who was one of the band’s collaborators), which sees tons of random archival and contemporaneous footage from all kinds of media carefully curated and juxtaposed to create gorgeous and interesting thematic montages, which could be totally fucking exhausted if done poorly and stretched out to 93 minutes. Smith wisely combines the two, ensuring that the film never has a dull moment.
All of the standard biographical facts are present without feeling like they’re just reciting a Wikipedia page, and all of the imagery feels purposeful when paired with the band members’ reflections. As such, it’s a pretty fun time at the movies — you’re watching some of the 20th century’s best culture-jamming pranksters go about their business, pissing off the right people (drunks at shitty dives, record company executives, Neil Young, etc) and occasionally the wrong ones (Brian Eno, who hilariously makes an appearance here and talks about how much of a nightmare it was to produce Q: Are We Not Men?). This is more than enough for a good film, and spending time with weirdos like Mothersbaugh and Casale is as delightful as seeing them in their glory days on stage at Max’s Kansas City.
Yet Devo falls into a certain kind of artistic trap — one that doesn’t handicap it as a film, but rather one that muddles its meaning. There’s an old aphorism that comedic actors don’t get nominated for Oscars, and it’s true: You don’t get the same kind of respect for being funny as you do when you’re a serious-minded person doing serious work perceived in a serious way. This frustration is heavily expressed throughout Devo, as the subjects do their best to provide a course correction for their perception in the popular imagination. No, they weren’t just guys in silly hats making fun songs; they were artists in silly hats making fun songs. This is all well and good, but it feels a little on the nose: A person watching a Devo doc likely knows a bit more about them than just having heard “Whip It” – a song that gets an entire segment dedicated to how wrong the public’s interpretations of its meaning were — on the radio. The band’s ethos — that humankind was devolving, not evolving — is constantly cited in an attempt to buffet this as well as separate them from the easy nihilism of English punk when it merely just feels like a more hopeful variation on the same, which is why it made a certain amount of sense that guys like Johnny Rotten would eventually pivot to PiL around the same time that Devo became mega-famous.
What Smith does get right is how special this particular story, specifically regarding the band’s origins: Devo was a working-class band comprised of Ohio nerds and several guys named Bob, who DIY-ed their way into superstardom without wholly compromising their ideals or creative vision. They had avant-garde style and little concern for the consumer and stumbled ultimately into innovating popular music. It took time, hard work, and plenty of precarity to get to the point that they were being laureled by Bowie, one of their biggest inspirations while being introduced at one of their first shows in New York. This makes the emphasis on the lack of comparative respect understandable — it must be a special kind of hell to endure all of that and eventually get famous while being wholly misunderstood as an artist — but it also doesn’t fully capture the magic of their success. They became insanely popular at a moment in time in which seriousness was in vogue, and helped to upend the rules of cool as we understood them.
There is no smoldering sex here or excessive edge to lean on, just a group of fascinating and provocative performers who, for a brief moment, made earworms and eye-catching visual art that had a little more perspective lurking behind the veil if one really wanted it to be present. It’s exceptionally rare for an artist to succeed in spite of their intentions, and this perspective might transformed an already-good flick like Devo into something truly special.