Brothers of the Head is a new offering in a formidably familiar couple of overdone genres. The Rock biopic or merely Rock film has been done again and again, particularly in these recent years. Some, like Van Sant's Last Days and Haynes' Velvet Goldmine get to the heart of the matter in a poetic and essentializing manner. In the former, Van Sant humbles those songs and persons whose mythologies have far surpassed their humanity (and who better to represent this than Kurt Cobain) showing us that those songs which have become anthems to an entire generation merely begin with a man in a room with a guitar. Plain and simple. Haynes' film is a more complex creature which investigates the inflated persona necessitated by the Glam Rock era, basically, personal mythology and how that not only affects the performer but those adoring fans who see in each gesture a world of meaning and validation. Both are grand stories of enormous public acclaim.

Brothers is a quieter film, though one quite indebted to both aforementioned films. Fronting as a documentary, this fictitious retelling of the tale of two Siamese twin brothers who form the front of a cultishly successful punk band called the Bang Bang. It is a film in constant flux, from overtly simplistic (which would seem to be the fate of conjoined twin fiction - really, it is a genre in itself) to surprisingly complex. As a writer, who arrives to condemn the manager for exploiting the twins' deformity observes, instead of finding two weak victims, Tom and Barry are strong and reverent individuals who seem quite comfortable with their circumstance.

Never quite settling on what you expect, the film is at once a condemning parody of the contemporary Biopic, a mutivalent exploration of collaboration, a love letter to the punk era, a visually driven non-narrative experimental film and an all-too conforming doco (even though it's not really). I'm not convinced that it should have presented itself as a documentary. That would seem to be the one great flaw in the film. The "source" footage being so beautiful, one is slightly irked when the camera returns to the talking head which he already knows to be a falsity. This critic, of course already admirously familiar with the cult director Ken Russell was pleasantly surprised at his appearance at the film's opening. Russell, the film would have you believe, followed his (actual) Tommy with a biopic called Two-Way Romeo which the film presents in small segments (though it is quite obviously not a Russell film)

To claim that Brothers was free of flaws would be completely incorrect. They are quite prevalent throughout, but I am hard pressed to recall a film whose aesthetic was as tight and breathtaking as Brothers of the Head. A fictitious documentary film crew shoots the "archival" footage from which this film has been assembled. It is some beautiful footage, grainy and sensual. There's one shot of the brothers bathing themselves in a darkened room. The smoky haze of "dated" filmstock renders the scene with a pictorialist sumptuousness. Light cascades over the lens as the brothers practice in a window-lined sitting room. We never truly believe that the twin actors are conjoined - mainly because of the directors' endless efforts illustrate their dependence. They do cartwheels together. They run together. They play guitar together. Overcompensation works oppositionally. Yet toward the end, you stop caring and give yourself over to the story. It's one that's not terribly original, but so beautiful that I found it difficult to tear my eyes from the screen.

Brothers of the Head opens this Friday in Los Angeles.