Siamese Dream

It’s hard to summarize Brothers of the Head without making the film sound like a joke: a faux documentary about Siamese twins who front a ’70s rock band … See? Spinal Tap with cripple jokes.

But there’s no joking here. Directed by Louis Pepe and Keith Fulton, who previously made Lost in La Mancha, the non-faux documentary about Terry Gilliam’s doomed Don Quixote epic, Brothers is dour, affecting and, most impressively, so credible that even seasoned rock aesthetes could be forgiven for believing that two dudes joined at the torso helped invent punk rock. (They did not.)At age 18, conjoined twins Tom and Barry Howe, raised in virtual isolation in a remote English coastal town, are sold off by their father to a Vaudevillian svengali, who stashes them in a country house and hires an abusive manager (Sean Harris, who played doomed Joy Division singer Ian Curtis in 24 Hour Party People) to turn them into a rock band/freak show called the Bang Bang. Tom learns to play guitar and write songs while, just to his left, Barry hones his mean streak into cocky frontman swagger. Rehearsals become songs, songs become good songs and gigs become spectacles, all captured by a D.A. Pennebaker stand-in whose “archival” footage is blended with present-day testimonies from fictional and non-fictional talking heads. That Tom and Barry are not among them suggests this story may not end whimsically.

While the verité style and sober tone contribute to the film’s air of plausibility, the story itself is rooted enough in pop-history minutiae to lend credence. Is the exploitation of misfits who play scrappy riffs for drunken mobs paying to see a potentially violent sideshow really that different from what Malcolm McLaren did with the Sex Pistols? Iconoclast auteur Ken Russell appears as himself alongside “clips” from his macabre Howe brothers dramatization, which certainly seems like the kind of movie the director of Tommy might have made. And while fake-band movie music tends to be reliably horrid, the Bang Bang’s songs (written by Clive Langer and performed live by the actors onscreen) are actually good — “Two-Way Romeo” could have been a protopunk single, and wouldn’t sound out of place on a Stooges album.

But the crowning achievement is the fortuitous casting of 19-year-old identical twins and acting novices Luke and Harry Treadaway as Barry and Tom, respectively, who draw distinctly different, subtly nuanced characters, having spent months strapped to one another before and during the shoot to master the physicality of their unique connection.

This is not to say the film is devoid of cliché: We get the brash lead singer who does tons of coke at the first sign of success and the sensitive genius who falls for the music-journalist-with-a-heart-of-gold. (Apparently, they exist.) But the familiarity of this romantic triangle is certainly outweighed by the fact that the two suitors share a ribcage, making for the most awkward postcoital cuddle you’ll see all year.

The improv-heavy style that Spinal Tap’s Christopher Guest also went on to use in Waiting for Guffman and Best in Show is the obvious blueprint for Confetti, another British import, and the comparison does Debbie Isitt’s movie no favors. A bridal magazine holds a contest awarding a free house to the couple with the most original nuptials concept, and the film follows the preparations of the three quirky finalists: self-absorbed tennis pros, hardcore nudists and show-tune aficionados. Cute but ultimately forgettable, nothing here feels particularly spontaneous or unpredictable, which kinda defeats the point of pretending to capture “real-life” moments.

Blackballed: The Bobby Dukes Story takes place in 2003 and no, it’s not a period piece. This paintball [sigh] mockumentary — doesn’t anybody feel like writing a script? — has been kicking around for three years until this month’s DVD release and would probably still be in limbo if not for the fact that it stars Rob Corddry, heir apparent to Steve Carell and Stephen Colbert as Daily-Show-correspondent-turned-breakout-star. With his deadpan delivery and awesomely tufty male-pattern baldness, Corddry is able to evoke laughs even in a relatively straight-man role, but the concept — a disgraced paintball star assembles a ragtag team of misfits after a decade-long exile — banks too heavily on the hope that audiences will find the very concept of a paintball mockumentary as audacious as whoever else was doing bong hits in the room when the idea was first hatched.