The fascinating and thoroughly unsettling story of Siamese-twin rock stars who fill the gap between glam and punk in 1970s Britain is played with gusto, dark humor and creepy verisimilitude by real-life twins Luke and Harry Treadaway. Brothers of the Head plays at mockumentary, but has all the layers of first-rate fiction. The Treadaway brothers so exude the sweaty sex appeal of real gonzo punkers in their frenzied performances as the Bang Bang that we start praying for the boys to avoid the inevitable meltdown when a pushy female reporter comes between them.

Loosely based on Brian Aldiss' 1977 novel, Brothers seamlessly segues between the Bang Bang's tragic rise and fall in the mid-70s and an American filmmaker's interviews with the surviving participants two-and-a-half decades later. The film questions our desire to embrace over-the-top myths about larger-than-life rock heroes, sealing the deal with asides from an unfinished work by that one-man lunatic fringe, filmmaker Ken Russell. Name your favorite British rock movie, and Brothers of the Head jumps into bed with it, with all the fervor the twins bring to their astonishing moment in the spotlight.

The Treadaway brothers nicely capture the subtle distinctions between the Johnny Rotten-like audacity of Barry and more introspective inclinations of Tom, the twin who sort of gets the girl. A variation on themes explored in the Polish Brothers' more claustrophobic Twin Falls, Idaho, Brothers does not entirely skirt the obvious homoerotic potential of the siblings' dilemma. It's the first feature from the co-director/life-partner team of Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe, whose nonfiction film Lost in La Mancha chronicled Terry Gilliam's failed attempt to make The Man Who Killed Don Quixote.

Co-director Pepe was in town this past April for the film's Bay Area debut at the San Francisco International Film Festival. We sat down with him for a candid discussion about twins on and off screen.

David Lamble: How did you find the Treadaway twins?

Louis Pepe: Well, we had a film that had Siamese twin leads, and Siamese twins are always identical twins, so we told the casting director, "We need identical twins. They need to be in their early 20s, they need to be beautiful in a kind of feral, scrawny Sid Vicious sort of way. They need to be able to sing really well, play musical instruments and have

Treadaway bros. in Brothers of the Head.

the charisma of rock & roll frontmen, and they need to be excellent actors." Not asking too much. And she was like, "Right. We'll see."

We auditioned a lot of individual guys, and she said, "Find one that works, and we'll try and find a guy who looks like him." In the meantime she found Harry and Luke, and we looked at them. "Well, they look the part. They act really well, they sing really well. Okay, something's wrong, it's just too good to be true, every single thing on the checklist is being hit."

The situation has built-in homosexual dimensions. They could both be gay and into each other, one might be and the other not. They could be any combination of things. How was this relationship conceived?

The issue of sexuality was not necessarily raised that way in the novel, or even in the script initially. We thought, "Yeah, the rock & roll scene is very straight a lot of the time, even though they play with this polymorphously perverse sexuality." One of the things about Twin Falls, Idaho is that the twins are so sterile sexually. From our perspective as gay directors, the second you strap two 20-year-old boys together, nipple to nipple, of course you've got to explore it.

Part of the film is that there are certain things about Tom and Barry's relationship that are mysteries, withheld from the characters around them and from the audience. But we did want that kind of tension. They have a very physically intimate relationship with each other, everything from a scene where they kiss each other to more subtle things where they might just stroke each other's hair absent-mindedly while they're sitting there. There was one point in the development of the script, "Oh, is Barry gay?" It seemed to collapse that down to a definitive thing obscured the more blurry boundaries that exist in a lot of the peacockery of rock & roll. We wanted the film to have that eroticism without it ever being as cut-and-dry as, "This one's gay and that one's straight." There's a scene where Barry kisses another guy. You ask different audiences about whether Barry's gay and people say, "Oh no, he's a rock star, he'll kiss whoever's available to kiss him!"

Co-director Louis Pepe.

It does raise questions about our fascination with twins in general, not merely conjoined twins.

We watched a documentary while doing the research for the film: The Chappelle Sisters, Reba and Lorie Chappelle, conjoined twins in Pennsylvania, are joined at the forehead, so they basically look over each other's shoulders. The film opens where they go out in New York City, and one of the sisters is videotaping, and you see all the responses of people being perplexed. The filmmakers interviewed onlookers afterwards. They're interviewing this older, married couple, and the husband and wife keep saying, "Oh my god, we can't imagine, how do you live like that? What is it like to be so dependent upon each other?" And as they're saying this, basically completing each other's sentences, they're responding as a kind of symbiotic union.

I remember talking to Harry and Luke about this. They're not conjoined, but as twins, they have a very intimate bond. To spend so many years with another person, you have a kind of intimacy that other people don't fully understand. If it is suddenly taken away from you, it's a loss that you can't completely cope with. Physically, we look at conjoined twins and say, "How do they do it?" But on a deeper emotional level, that kind of bond between people is one many of us are actually looking for.

Talk about the music of the Bang Bang.

The film is set in late 1974/early 75, and Aldiss' novel never specified what the music was. You get the impression it's more like Led Zeppelin-style rock & roll. The concept of conjoined twins fronting a rock band is so much about embracing the freakishness that punk music is about that, it's got to be more of that vein. But two hours of punk music is a bit hard on the ears. What happens if we make the Bang Bang the missing link between the New York punk scene, the British glam rock scene, and the Sex Pistols? So they're going to have the transgressive energy of Iggy Pop, the New York Dolls, the Velvet Underground and the Ramones, then we're going to throw in the freakish David Bowie glam-rock stuff and funnel into this thing that comes screaming out in 76 in the Sex Pistols. We asked composer Clive Langer, "Give us the missing link. Give us the band that is the missing link between these movements." Now playing.