DEVO

Chris Smith's documentary starts Devo's fifty-year story with the idea it was founded on. The band began in Akron in 1973 as an art collective formed by two sets of brothers who met at Kent State University, Mark and Bob Mothersbaugh and Gerald and Bob Casale. The name comes from de-evolution, the proposition that humankind is not advancing but running backwards. The film's most important observation is where that joke came from. Its founders witnessed the massacre at Kent State on 4 May 1970, when National Guardsmen killed four unarmed students. Devo's strange costumes, mechanical movement and sardonic tone took shape after that, which means there is anger underneath everything that looks ridiculous. The documentary is built from previously unseen archive material and interviews with Mark Mothersbaugh, Bob Mothersbaugh and Jerry Casale, and the section on how the music video was invented in the early days of MTV is particularly good. It premiered at Sundance in 2024 and was released on Netflix. Who it is for: viewers interested in new wave, art collectives and subculture history. Who it is not for: anyone wanting a documentary focused on the music itself, since this is mostly about the idea.