In 1973, Mark Mothersbaugh and Jerry Casale, along with their brothers (both named Bob), formed Devo. The band would go on to success in a multitude of different ways. Director Chris Smith of American Movie fame presents the band’s story with his documentary, Devo, released by Netflix. Is Smith’s recounting of the band’s history worthy of that pie in the sky?
Right off the bat, Chris Smith riffs on the artsy mashups of kitsch and culture the band has cultivated over the last fifty-plus years by splicing together video of the horrible moments in American history, Americana, and the country’s cultural contradictions that led to the creation of the band. While it’s not an unusual way to present a band’s story on film, it helps that Smith has access to a lot of the archival material shot by Devo throughout their career. Being a band led by two artists, Devo has always been a visual band. Despite postulating on their theory of de-evolution, their evolution of creating art is documented well.
Another great aspect was how it shows that art begets more art, especially pulling from all the influences around them. Starting as a political movement, the doc spends a good amount of time on Mark and Jerry’s enrollment at Kent State University along with what they were consuming to feed their minds. From their participation as protesters in the tragic Kent State shooting to the weird allegories of The Island of the Lost Souls, we get the strange origin of Devo’s worldview.
While always on the cusp, Devo was never fully considered punk rock. They more or less infiltrated pop culture to call out its degradation. After their breakthrough into mainstream culture is shown, the doc sort of skims through the band’s exploitation of it and American values. Devo’s mocking attitude never made it feel like they were selling out. However, underneath all of this strangeness was a message that still continues to be mistaken for novelty rather than satire. What most people never got is that the call was coming from inside the house, and by the time anybody noticed what they were doing, Devo was already sleeping on the couch.
The amount of sound bites and interviews Smith was able to compile from non-band footage is impressive; Not just the amount of footage, but the variety of it. The doc doesn’t release much new audio from the band, as they have released most of these early recordings and videos on their own. Smith’s presentation is fantastic and they’ve done a great job cleaning up the old footage of the band’s earlier work.
I was almost turned off by the documentary’s ninety-minute runtime cause I knew what would be cut. The first half covers the band’s origin at Kent State to their first TV appearance on SNL, which would more or less be considered their breakthrough. We get Devo’s rise to fame from their debut Are We Not Men? We Are Devo! to Oh, No! It’s Devo and about ten minutes of low moments after the failure of 1984’s Shout.
Not that I want to see anyone suffer, but I would have been more interested in another twenty or thirty minutes and seen the stories behind later ventures like Devo 2.0 and the band’s resurgence in the late 2000s. The pacing moves fast, and while a lot of information is thrown at you, it feels like some things were left behind. While the final act feels very compressed, it’s less a failure of the storytelling than it is fitting fifty years of a career into ninety minutes.
All in all, Chris Smith’s Devo documentary works on several levels. To quote the title of the band’s last album, this doc has Something For Everybody. Presenting Devo as an art group rather than a band and letting people in on their enigmatic concept may seem antithetical to their aesthetic, but after fifty years of presenting the evidence themselves maybe Devo’s theory of de-evolution is right. Devo is available for streaming on Netflix.