Devo documentary: Netflix’s movie is great—but ignores one key irony.

“ What do you do when you live in a country where your government is doing terrible things? ” the filmmaker Julia Loktev recently asked me. In the case of Mark Mothersbaugh and Gerald Casale, the answer was: Start a band.

If all you know of Devo is hit singles like “Whip It,” they don’t sound like a band that was formed in response to the Kent State shootings of May 4, 1970, when National Guard troops opened fire on an anti-war protest and killed four unarmed college students. With their clipped guitars and squiggly synthesizers, their songs don’t sound like protest music, and their lyrics are a jumble of absurdist poetry and references to midnight movies and discarded junk culture. Compared to the straightforwardness of Neil Young’s “Four dead in Ohio,” a line like “ God made man, but