I went into Chris Smiths new film about Devo expecting a nostalgia trip. I thought I would see the red flowerpot hats, maybe a little of Whip It, and some grainy clips of the late seventies. That is not what I got. What I found instead felt like a big idea folded into a concert movie, a collage that turns a famous group into a live argument about art, commerce, anger, and the kind of future people were promised and never received. It is brash and funny and sometimes very sad. It also makes a case that this group was not merely a clever act with a quirky look. They were a conversation that never ended.
If you only knew them for one song, you are not alone. There was a time when a lot of people treated them as a novelty. You heard Whip It, saw the hats, and moved on. But anyone who dug an inch deeper knew there was a lot more there. Devo were not simple. They were the sort of group that invites debate. Some people disliked the sound. Others thought the whole thing was a prank. But even the skeptics could tell the ideas were dense and deliberate. The best part of the film is how it makes that density feel thrilling instead of academic.
Smiths movie rolls for ninety minutes without stalling. It is a flood of images and voices that carry you along, and yet there is shape and momentum. Editor Joey Scoma builds a rhythm that fits the subject. The style of the film mirrors the music. Quick jumps. Strange juxtapositions. A guitar lick. A clip from a classroom film. A poster. A chant. Another needle drop. After a while you feel the whole thing linking together. It becomes more than a band story. It starts to feel like a cultural x ray.
At the core are two people who met at Kent State University in the late nineteen sixties. Gerald Casale and Mark Mothersbaugh were art kids. They were cartoonists and tinkerers who found each other through weird flyers and stickers that showed up around campus. They were left leaning and opposed to the war in Vietnam. They read strange books and dug into junk science as raw material for art. They put out their feelers in all directions. They made films and recordings and posters that played with the idea that progress is not guaranteed. It can move in reverse. They rebranded evolution as devolution and instead of treating that as a joke they built a whole world around it.
The idea came from everywhere. They borrowed phrases from ads and newspapers. They clipped headlines. They watched old movies and kept going back to the European art that rose up after the first world war, when so much optimism had been smashed. They loved The Velvet Underground and also the aura that hung around the Factory, with Andy Warhol turning any surface into a canvas and treating music, painting, printing, fashion, and film as parts of the same machine. They were fascinated by the cold glimmer of Metropolis, that silent vision of a city that runs on the bodies of workers who move like clock parts. They looked at island of Dr Moreau and zombie stories and odd books with big claims. There is one called The Beginning Was the End that tells a ridiculous tale about apes and brain eating and the loss of a psychic gift. They grabbed that too, not as science but as a myth that explains why people can be so clever and so deeply unwise at the same time. It is a messy stew. On purpose.
The Kent State shootings were not a footnote for them. They changed everything. When President Richard Nixon widened the war by bombing Cambodia, protests erupted on campuses. In Ohio the campus became a war zone. Tension rose, the police and National Guard came in, the Reserve Officers Training Corps building was set on fire, a form of martial law was declared, and then the unthinkable happened. Soldiers opened fire. Four students died. Nine were injured. Casale knew two of the people who were killed. You watch him remember this in the film and it is still raw. The shock had a second phase too. Polls and street interviews showed that many Americans blamed the students. The message that came back to young people was simple and brutal. Keep your head down. If you raise a sign you will be punished. Protest is a problem, not a duty.
From that moment, the worldview that would power the group got sharper and more unforgiving. The promise of a bright future that had been sold to families in the fifties and sixties now felt like a kind of bad joke. We were supposed to get smarter, you can hear them saying, and more humane. Instead we learned to memorize slogans and follow instructions. We learned to be efficient and cheerful and obedient. And all the while, they noticed how mass culture took whatever it touched and turned it into an instrument for selling. Mark Mothersbaugh talks about a fast food ad from 1974 that set a sales jingle to Pachelbels Canon. You probably know the tune. It is stately and delicate. The ad turned that beautiful melody into a sign that you can order a sandwich however you like. For Mothersbaugh that was a goad, not a cute bit of trivia. If they could strip a piece of art for parts in order to move burgers then he and Casale could move in the other direction. They could take simple hooks and punchy beats and smuggle ideas into the bloodstream of popular music.
Here is where the group becomes hard to pigeonhole. They were rock and also not rock. They had guitars and drums and synths. They made short songs you can sing. They were also performance artists, pranksters, ad men, teachers, and critics who built a visual language that sat on top of the music and whispered here is another way to see this. They wrote catchy choruses but the lyrics jab at the pose of cool, at conformity, at the dream of endless growth, at the insistence that everything is fine. They called out what they saw as an emptiness in arena size rock of the period, which seemed to be designed to move product and not much else. Their stance could be lofty and defiant. They could also be very funny. Sometimes in the same minute.
Chris Smith is a good match for this material. He has spent decades filming people who are trying to slip through the gears of systems that do not care about them. His work jumps between scripted and non fiction films and the through line is a curiosity about how people invent themselves in order to survive and sometimes to make something wild. American Job and American Movie are different kinds of films but they share a tenderness for people who keep going. Jim and Andy is a portrait of a performance and a person who decided to push a bit too far. What Smith gets right in the Devo film is the feel of the circle they built. He was given access to their own trove of tapes and photos and flyers and handwritten bits. You feel like you are sitting in a studio and the shelves are full and the drawers are full and every time he opens one there is a new shock or a laugh.
We meet the other players too. There is the sure and precise drummer Alan Myers. There is Marks brother Bob on guitar. There is Bobs brother Bob on keyboards and guitar. For fun they used to introduce themselves as Bob one and Bob two. The joke is representative of how casual and lightly theatrical they could be in person. The film uses that humor wisely. It makes space for goofy stories. There is a scene from an early show where they were billed as a punk act at an Akron club called The Crypt and regulars cursed them out for not meeting that standard. There is a story about how seeing The Ramones flipped a switch for them. They discovered that speed could be clarifying. The songs clicked when they were played faster and tighter. That detail makes sense the instant you hear it.
Because the film is a collage it can fold in so many kinds of things without feeling scattered. There are interviews and music videos and live performances. There are home movies and training films and cartoons and bits of advertising that echo that old Pachelbel story. The approach hints at classic montage theory from the early days of cinema, the idea that every cut creates a thought in the audience. It is also gleeful and daffy in a Saturday morning way. At times it feels like a companion piece to The Atomic Cafe, which mined old government films to show how a nation talks to itself. Other times it echoes the propulsive charge of Natural Born Killers and the crisp cool of Todd Hayness film about The Velvet Underground. Yet it never feels like imitation. It feels quick and personal, which is hard to pull off.
There is a reality we cannot ignore, and Smith does not. A lot of films about famous bands have a built in contradiction. They sell the rebellion of youth with the tools of a marketing department. Money comes from places that have an interest in keeping the catalog alive and in public ears. This one is no different. Warner Music helped pay for it. BMG did as well. There is a temptation to roll your eyes there and walk away. But the film raises the question before you can. Can an act that once mocked corporate rock make a movie with funding from giant companies and still push back at the culture that those companies shape. Maybe yes. Maybe not. The movie lands somewhere in the middle. It admits the tension and then makes an argument that you can use a system to smuggle contraband ideas into the open. You can feel free to disagree with that. It is part of the conversation.
What makes the conversation feel urgent now is the world we are living in. The film was made in a period when political and social life can feel grim and fragile. The songs that once sounded like prop comedy come across like warning flares. Satisfaction turns from a cover into a manifesto about useless desires. Working in a Coal Mine is a cartoon on the surface and a dirge underneath. Uncontrollable Urge thrashes in an anxious loop that feels very current. Gates of Steel pounds like an industrial spell. Beautiful World plays with the tension between glossy optimism and the image track that undercuts it. The film lets these performances land without smothering them in analysis. When you get to the end you may find yourself humming while also staring into space.
Let me go back to the beginning of their story for a minute, because the origin matters. Two young artists witness a massacre and a public that shrugs. They watch advertising chew up classical music. They watch authorities deploy force against dissent. They notice how easy it is for big media to turn protest into a caricature or a punch line. Instead of withdrawing they invent a set of masks and slogans and characters and they push them out into the world. They choose satire as a blade. They write songs that can be read two or three ways at once. They dress like factory workers and lab technicians and cartoon men of the future. They make short films with a stilted corporate voice that tells you to obey. They engineer and rehearse and sharpen until the stage show snaps into place. They take their hometown strangeness to New York and then to the world. Their ambition is not to be loved. It is to be seen and to be understood, even if the understanding comes years later.
Smiths film gets at the tenderness inside that ambition. For all the sarcasm, these are men haunted by a sense of loss. They lost friends. They lost faith in a story that once felt safe to believe. And yet they keep making. They keep documenting themselves as if to say if we do not capture this then it will be reshaped and sold back to us. The archive in the film is incredible because they made it themselves. Early on you see black and white footage of students walking out of one of their sound experiments. The camera does not flinch. It watches the empty room the way a scientist observes the aftermath of a test. The young artists are not crushed by the silence. They are curious about it. Why did this not work. How do we come back tomorrow and try again.
There is a detail in the movie that kept echoing in my head after it ended. Many critics love to compare artists to other artists. Devo gets matched with The Velvet Underground a lot. You can see why. They share a cold beauty and a blunt approach to taboo. They also share the glow of Warhols influence. But what the film shows is they went beyond homage. They took those lessons and pressed them into new shapes. They mixed electronics with punk with art school media tricks. They made perfect pop songs that worked as slogans and pranks and poems. Then they toured them until the edges were sharp as razors. They made music videos before that was a job description. They wrote and designed and filmed. They were a studio that happened to have a band in it.
I should say a word about craft. The editing is a star here. It is not just rapid cutting. It is musical. It builds motifs and then breaks them. It sets up a voice or an image and then flips it with another angle or a sudden bit of context. The sound design is packed but not cluttered. When the music hits, the film opens up and lets it breathe. When the talking takes over, the score tucks in and holds the mood. The pacing is a small miracle. It feels fast but never rushed. You can keep up yet you are a half step behind the next turn, which is the right place to be in a movie like this. The tone shifts without apology. Just when you are laughing, a memory opens a fault line and the room goes still. Then a joke returns and you remember that laughter was one of their tools. Not a shield. A way through.
If you love the group this is an easy recommendation. There are new angles on old stories and fresh performance clips that punch hard. If you do not know them, it can work as a doorway. You do not need to read a hundred pages before the film makes sense. It catches you up as it goes. It also respects you. It leaves space to argue back. You could watch this movie and walk out thinking that the anti corporate stance is undercut by the corporate funding. You could decide that the satire is too pleased with itself. Or you could feel the opposite. You could decide that the act of bringing these ideas into a marketplace and refusing to soften them is a kind of courage. The movie does not scold you into picking the right answer. It presents the case as art and then lets the songs make their case too.
What has lingered for me is a particular mood. It is the mood of stubborn hope that lives inside cynicism. These men did not trust the promise of progress anymore. They saw too much. They felt the ground shift under their feet when the students were shot. They felt it again when they watched commercials eat beauty and spit out product. They felt it every time crowds demanded entertainment and not challenge. And still they wrote. They kept drawing. They kept filming. They kept rehearsing until the groove locked and the chant sounded like an alarm. It is a contradictory feeling, this mixture of regret and insistence. It is also very human.
The last thing I noticed might sound small but is not. Devo always cared about what things looked like. The outfits, the covers, the videos, the typography. They wanted the visuals to speak before the sound started. They understood that we live in a sea of signs and that you ignore that at your peril. Smith treats those signs with the same attention. He puts their iconography in conversation with the news and movies and ads of the time and of our time. A collage of corporate training film stills sits beside a live performance. An education short about how to be a good employee, then a shot of a crowd bouncing in the glow of stage lights. A smiling cartoon face next to a lyric that sounds like it was written yesterday. It is simple and it is smart. It makes their argument better than a lecture ever could.
By the time the credits roll the hats are just one detail among many. The one hit is revealed as one cut from a deep catalog. The pranks make sense as tactics. The politics are not slogans but a point of view that has held steady over decades because it was born in a very specific fire. The film itself plays with the same contradiction the group embraced. It is funded in part by the kind of companies that dominate music, and it uses that money to amplify a message that is not exactly friendly to power. There is a tension there and it feels honest to keep it on the screen instead of smoothing it away.
So yes, this is a music film. It is also a story about how people take a hurt and turn it into art that bites back. It is a reminder that popular forms can carry serious ideas if you are willing to build them carefully and aim them precisely. It is proof that a collage can be clear and that clarity does not require softness. I walked in expecting camp and left with something sharper. I still hum the songs. I also catch myself looking twice at every slogan I see. That seems right. That seems like the point.
