Leave your preconceptions at the door, please. You won't be needing them when you're done here. Brothers of the Head is a film the likes of which you've not seen before. Ostensibly the story of conjoined twins who rise to rock stardom in the mid 1970s, it spits out inherent cliches to emerge as an ultimately tragic tale of isolation.
Based on the novel by speculative fiction author Brian Aldiss, and scripted by Tony Grisoni (Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas), Brothers of the Head is presented as a fictionalized documentary. But don't label it a "mockumentary" — this film immerses the viewer so deeply in its alternate reality that one is almost convinced that it really did happen. Co-directors Keith Sulton and Louis Pepe (Lost in LaMancha) are best known for their documentaries, and it is to their credit they continued this approach with Brothers of the Head. This is a story that could not be properly told in a linear style.
Tom and Barry Howe were born conjoined at the sternum, and their mother died during childbirth. Their grief-stricken father, fearing he would lose them both, refused to consider separating them surgically. They spend their formative years, relatively isolated, on L'Estrange Head, an island off eastern England. But when a promoter approaches the father with the idea of turning the boys into a musical act, he accepts immediately, and pretty much sells the twins to the promoter.
This set-up would be trite, but it's layered into the film via interviews and "footage" chronicling the rise and fall of the brothers' band, the Bang Bang.
It's pretty much a given that it's impossible to write a great rock and roll drama, since the nature of the beast dictates that the story has to center around the rise to glory and the inevitable fall from grace. Brothers of the Head takes that premise and spins it into the darkly surreal. This isn't really a rock movie — the proto-punk London of the mid-seventies is only a backdrop for the story of a soul in conflict with itself. Tom and Barry are a singular soul trapped in separate bodies, forever linked by the appendage that binds them.
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