Premiering in the United States at SXSW, Brothers Of The Head is a strange film about conjoined twins who become the frontmen in a 1975 punk rock band, The Bang Bang.
That’s what I had to go on based on the synopsis provided by SXSW. It was a spur of the moment decision to see the film. Nobody I talked to in line had really heard anything about the film so I viewed it with blind expectations. Had I done the research I have done now on the film, I believe the film would have been less effective.
The film is described as a narrative and drama but in all practical terms, is a documentary. The filmmakers are best known by the 12 Monkeys documentary as well as Lost In La Mancha - so they are documentary filmmakers. To decide to tell the story as not as a mockumentary but as an actual documentary is a risky choice but effective. They definitely pulled it off and most of the audience, as revealed by the Q&A did not really know if the Howe Brothers, The Bang Bang and supporting characters actually exist and if it was “real”.
Perhaps this was also the intent of the book for which the screenplay has adapted. The book was written by cult sci-fi author Brian W. Aldiss who, as an audience member pointed out, claims to have had his first “introduction” to Tom and Barry Howe in 1975 on his website.
The “is it real or not” has always been a successful gimmick, perhaps first wielded in RTF by Orson Wells reading of War of The Worlds. It has definitely been used a lot lately - I would assume a reaction to the success of The Blair Witch Project. And I would assume that this is why I felt Brothers Of The Head felt gimmicky. I’m not sure if telling this story, true or false, was best told by a documentary film. But I congratulate the filmmakers on their success of execution - I wasn’t 100% sure that the conjoined twins were not actually conjoined until the credits rolled for prosthetic make-up artists.
I was just listening to Led Zeppelin - Your Time Is Gonna Come