Near the end of Chris Smith’s new documentary, the co-founders of Devo are asked a pointed question during a television interview in the 1980s: Are you guys serious?

At this point in their career, the band had already scaled the charts with the misunderstood pop song Whip It, had become pioneering video stars on MTV and released several albums. On this particular TV appearance, they had abandoned their trademark energy-dome red hats for shiny, hard-plastic wigs that were meant to recall JFK’s coif, although many – horrifyingly to Devo – mistook it as a nod to Ronald Reagan. All four members of the band are lying casually on their stomachs for some reason and wearing matching black outfits. Devo co-creator and co-vocalist Jerry Casale is busy talking about the band’s self-awareness when the question is asked. Twice.

The question and the band’s blunt answers are at the heart of Smith’s engaging, fast-paced documentary. Throughout the film, there is a recurring theme of the band being misunderstood: “I think Devo may be the most misunderstood band to ever show up on the face of the planet,” Casale says at one point. While deeply invested in achieving the popularity they enjoyed in the 1980s, the act had a specific agenda for infiltrating the mainstream. They wanted to seriously change things – politics, culture, Western society – even if that idea often got overlooked by critics and even fans in favour of concentrating on the band’s novel, anti-rock image and sound. Even The Rolling Stone Record Guide begins its section on the band with the line “Devo were a highly elaborate, and pretty good, joke.”

If there is one clear message the film repeats throughout, it’s that Devo was most certainly not a joke. More than 50 years after the seeds for the band were planted in the aftermath of the 1970 Kent State University shootings, both Casale and Mothersbaugh have plenty to say on the matter.

“Our intentions and what motivated us were extremely different than 99 per cent of the bands out there,” says Mothersbaugh, in a joint interview alongside Casale. “I really think very few bands were thinking about things like de-evolution and humans being the unnatural species and that being central to what we were talking about and thinking about.”

“We were excited by ideas and information and science,” Casale adds. “We were really interested in the social sciences and discoveries about how the brain works and politics, psychology (and) the intersection of those disciplines.”

“When people called us rock musicians or something, we would correct them and say we’d prefer to be thought of as social scientists,” Mothersbaugh says. “Some of them would say ‘Whoa, that’s a bunch of sh-t.’ ”

“They thought it was just a pose, that we were posturing and being pretentious,” Casale says. “But it wasn’t true.”

Smith’s documentary, which will screen on Friday as part of the Calgary Underground Film Festival’s CUFF.Docs, delivers on several levels. It traces Devo’s undeniably fascinating origins in Akron, Ohio, chronicles the act’s often hilarious interactions with mainstream culture during their rise to fame and offers a treasure trove for fans interested in seeing a fast-paced, ingeniously edited collection of archival material from the band’s earliest performances to current interviews with Casale and Mothersbaugh. Smith, whose previous credits include the documentary series Mr. McMahon and Branson and the film Jim and Andy: The Great Beyond, used to play in a Devo cover band as a kid. He approached the surviving members of the band, including Casale, Mothersbaugh and Bob Mothersbaugh, Mark’s brother and Devo’s lead guitarist, about doing a documentary. But they didn’t have any real conversations about the topics the film would cover until they were being interviewed in front of the camera. The film, they say, is Smith’s vision.

“If Jerry would have made a documentary on Devo and if I had made a documentary on Devo, I’m sure they would be totally different from each other and from Chris’s documentary,” Mothersbaugh says.

While the film is chock full of archival material and interviews, Casale says there was a lot left out about Devo’s complex history.

“I would have rather seen a series, like four one-hour episodes, to really deal with the length and breadth of Devo’s career that was so interesting and so iconoclastic and had so many components,” he says. “Because we were experimental, we were visual, we were ahead of our time. You can’t do that in an hour and a half. This was more the Cliff Notes of Devo.”

But it does trace the band’s unusual origins at Kent State University, where Casale and Mothersbaugh were both art students. Devo began more as a concept and philosophy than a band. It was inspired by Dadaism and based on the concept of de-evolution, which suggested that despite unyielding prosperity and the American Dream promised in the 1950s, mankind had reached a point of regression by the late 1960s and early 1970s. The idea took on a much darker tone after the 1970s Kent State University shootings when four unarmed students were killed by members of the Ohio National Guard during protests on campus.

Developing a lo-fi, proto-punk sound, the band went through the usual struggles before landing a major record deal and finding success as pioneering video stars and architects of the so-called New Wave. Ironically, they did it in the 1980s during the Reagan years in America, when consumerism and aversion to critical thinking they were satirizing was in full swing.

Some of the funniest moments in the film come from the band’s appearances on mainstream talk shows, where bewildered interviewers such as Dick Clark and Merv Griffin pepper the band with banal questions. In one scene, all five members of Devo are shown sitting on stools during a talk show with matching black outfits and red helmets. Sitting between them is grinning actor John Schneider, the star of the hokey 1980s series The Dukes of Hazard.

When asked why they thought this was a good time to make a film about Devo, Casale simply says “Better late than never.”

But it’s easy to see how the band’s theory of de-evolution resonates with current times and political climate in the United States. The band’s 1980 single Freedom of Choice contained the lyrics “Freedom of choice is what you got, freedom from choice is what you want.” It just proves that de-evolution is real, Casale says.

“We were dealing with that horrible phenomena that we recognized then: People want to vote away their choice,” Casale says. “They have this flawed human nature where they want to suck up to authority. They want to be told what to do. They will vote away their freedom. That’s exactly what happened here.”