Sorta new wave, sorta post-punk, sorta art-rock, Devo is the sort of band one can relish in fits and starts. Best known for its 1980 hit “Whip It,” the group’s only single to land on Billboard‘s Top 40, the Akron, Ohio collective never made an all-timer album, but check out any compilation of Devo’s best-known songs and you’ll be tickled all over again by the sleek hooks, arch lyrics, and endless sense of play. From the angular guitars and sci-fi vibes of early classic “Jocko Homo” to 1990’s dance-y, ironic “Post Post-Modern Man,” Devo specializes in brainy, off-kilter tunes that make you feel cool for digging them. If not necessarily an essential band, they are certainly one of the defining groups of their era—in other words, the ideal candidate for an appealing, modestly-sized documentary that puts their mad experiments and subversive underpinnings in context.
That documentary is Chris Smith’s Devo, a breezy overview that never overstates the group’s greatness but may convince the skeptical that they’ve long underrated these proudly peculiar musicians. Built primarily around separate conversations with Devo leaders Mark Mothersbaugh and Gerald Casale, the documentary lacks the inventiveness of some of Smith’s celebrity portraits. But the deceptively straightforward package actually benefits a band that enjoys coloring outside the lines. Devo allows Devo the space to be its idiosyncratic self, both in the present-day interviews and the wealth of archival footage. Devo’s reign may have been relatively short, but Smith gives the band the fond memorializing it deserves.
Befriending one another at Kent State in the late 1960s, and profoundly affected by the 1970 killing of four classmates by Ohio National Guardsmen during campus protests, Mothersbaugh and Casale bonded over a shared love of ideas and art, only gradually embracing the notion of starting a band. As Devo explains, they gravitated to the theory of de-evolution—the belief that human society would eventually fall apart, as opposed to constantly progressing forward—which jibed with the collapsing America they saw around them amidst the Vietnam War.
After initially messing around with abrasive avant-garde approaches—dabbling in tuneless songs that went on forever, intentionally annoying their early crowds—Mothersbaugh and Casale hit upon a tighter, focused sound, releasing their first albums in the late 1970s, which mixed arresting originals like “Uncontrollable Urge” with postmodern remakes, such as “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction,” turning the Stones’ favorite into a hip, post-punk heater. If you didn’t know better, you’d swear Devo, who flaunted consciously robotic movements on stage, was stripping “Satisfaction” down to its basic sonic components, as if a computer was trying to simulate Mick Jagger’s swagger.
During their original run, Devo consisted of Mothersbaugh and Casale, the band’s principal songwriters, alongside drummer Alan Myers, guitarist Bob Mothersbaugh, and guitarist/keyboardist Bob Casale—the younger brothers, respectively, of Mark and Gerald. Devo contains the types of stories usually told in rock docs—the label and the general population didn’t get the band at first, but eventually something clicked—but Smith is refreshingly lowkey in his approach to a familiar music narrative. Undoubtedly, he takes his cue from Mothersbaugh and Casale, who are nonchalant about Devo’s ambitions and achievements.
Not that these guys didn’t put a lot of thought into their work, often lambasting herd mentality and mindless masculinity in their lyrics. But Devo exudes a slyness appropriate for a group that seemed to enjoy perplexing the record-buying public. (One of the documentary’s constant highlights is watching old clips in which journalists and television hosts are baffled by Devo’s not-of-this-Earth responses to their inane questions.) Individually, Mothersbaugh and Casale possess a biting sense of humor during the present-day interviews that belies their unpretentious Midwestern demeanor. Devo regularly presented its members as aliens or androids, but one comes away from the documentary appreciating the sardonic flesh-and-blood humans behind the conceit.
Smith, probably still best known for his 1999 documentary American Movie, which chronicled woefully untalented independent filmmaker Mark Borchardt as he shot his horror opus Coven, has gone on to profile far more famous artists, but rarely from the perspective you might be expecting. His 2017 portrait of Jim Carrey, Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond, starts as a look at the making of Man On The Moon before it transforms into a meditation on art, stardom and self-indulgence. In 2023, he directed Wham!, which is really about Andrew Ridgeley’s relationship with his old band and his late friend George Michael, who left him behind to pursue solo glory.
There’s no such deconstruction going on in Devo, but what connects it to Smith’s earlier work is a continuing fascination with the convergence of creativity and mass entertainment. The tension Carrey felt pursuing his uncompromising vision in Man On The Moon—going to extremes to stay in character as Andy Kaufman, aggravating his costars and director in the process—isn’t reflected as strongly in Devo’s comments about producing challenging music that, occasionally, became popular. (Although, it’s notable that these guys have mixed feelings about the success of “Whip It,” primarily because their interpretation of the song and its iconic video are not other people’s.)
Still, from the beginning, Mothersbaugh and Casale sought to confront the complacency of modern life, detesting the bland homogeneity and uninquisitive contentment of American suburban culture. Devo’s finest songs remain witty middle fingers, especially an angry anthem like 1980’s “Freedom Of Choice,” whose barbed, consistently misheard chorus—”Freedom of choice / Is what you got / Freedom from choice / Is what you want”—still says everything about a nation too willing to cede its freedoms for a false sense of security. The band’s battles with the suits and the squares are engaging, but what stands out in Devo is these guys’ lifetime commitment to ideas and art, the same organizing principles that inspired Mothersbaugh and Casale back in their college days.
Band members have left or died over the years, and the group’s leaders are now more engaged in other creative pursuits. Like Devo itself, Devo won’t change the world. But it will make you glad such brilliant weirdos decided to spend a few years screwing with the mainstream.
Director: Chris Smith
Release Date: August 19, 2025 (Netflix)
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