‘The Unheard Music’ (PG)

Like X, the Los Angeles post-punk band that inhabits this film, "The Unheard Music" is cohesive despite itself. Shot intermittently over a five-year period with make-do budgets, borrowed equipment and volunteered services, the 90-minute film by W.T. Morgan is a vivid collage of sound, image and style, ranging from old home films, new documentary footage and vintage film and television clips to clever animation splashes, post-card montages and other film techniques that match the band's music -- fast, dense, provocative, uncompromising.

"The Unheard Music" is also an intensely personal project, not a corporate one. After all, X is hardly the kind of band likely to earn MTV exposure, much less draw huge crowds to movie theaters. Since coming together 10 years ago, X has been a critical favorite without ever developing a presence on commercial radio or finding favor with the record-buying public. The band is, as its members sing in the song that gives the film its title, "locked out of the public eye."

X is one of the few bands to outgrow its origins in the Los Angeles punk underground of 1977 without abandoning its integrity. Then as now, its music reflected a brutal urban angst -- but unlike most of the band's compatriots, who mistook a brutal stance for substance, X had something to say and some invigorating ways to say it, thanks to the songwriting of bassist John Doe and singer Exene Cervenka.

The two met at a "Beyond Baroque" poetry workshop in Venice, Calif. Observing them at their home -- a grand junction of pop/kitsch and retrieved art -- it's not hard to envision them in an earlier age as kindred bohemian spirits confined to their garrets. But the hard-core punk movement provided them with a different forum.

Guitarist Billy Zoom joined the band in a more traditional way, answering a classified in an underground paper, and when D.J. Bonebrake settled in behind the drum kit, X was complete. Infusing their music with an rude, unsettling passion, Doe and Cervenka sang about the distance between image and reality in a Hollywoodized America. The anomie they witnessed was reflected in unsettling songs about worn psyches. "She wasn't what you'd call living, really/ but she was still awake," they sang at one point.

But X's tense, terse music isn't the result of lack of discipline or skill -- as Morgan makes clear, it is musically adept and intellectually inquisitive -- but of choices made and options defined. Ray Manzarek, the ex-Door who produced its first three albums, remembers being attracted to the idea of the group before he ever heard it live (its music had been described as sounding "like murder"). And while Doe and Cervenka's atonal harmonies are sometimes discomforting, there's as much reward as challenge in the listening.

"The Unheard Music," shot between 1980 and 1985, concentrates on songs from X's first three albums. Some are done live in clubs (where subtitles might help those not familiar with X's music), some in the studio. A few -- such as the haunting "I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts" and "Johnny Hit & Run Pauline" -- could fit into a standard video program that had guts instead of demographic goals. For "Motel Room in My Bed," Morgan created a flowing montage from vintage post cards and, on the title song, he filmed a huge house, split in two, being moved on trucks through an eerily beautiful nightscape.

Starting with home film shot as X was first coming together, Morgan traces its history elliptically, mixing performance and interview with snippets of '30s and '40s films, '50s and '60s commercials and '70s and '80s attitudes. The last are hilariously presented in two point-counterpoint interviews.

The first cross-cuts between Bob Biggs of the independent Slash label and Al Bergamo of media conglomerate MCA, who rattles on about the band's limited sales potential and touts rock dullards Point Blank as the wave of the future. Guess who signed X? Later, a radio station's program director explains why he won't play X, citing "demographics" and "profit centers" and looking the calculating fool compared with underground deejay Rodney Bigenheimer. (Ironically, X eventually did sign with a major label, but that didn't help it out of the cult ghetto.)

As for the band members, they come across as refreshingly natural, albeit a bit morbid at times -- particularly when the tending-to-gothic Exene recalls the death of her sister, killed in a car crash on her way to an X concert (mourning becomes electric in the song "Come Back to Me"). Billy Zoom's stock-still performing stance, easy manner and infectious grin often seem at odds with his crunching power chords, and it's intriguing to observe the two sides of Bonebrake, shirtless and viscerally intense on stage, genial and jolly as he plays jazzy marimbas in his apartment.

Penelope Spheeris' 1981 documentary, "The Decline of Western Civilization," captured the Los Angeles underground movement as it was emerging. Morgan chronicles its decline with a tour of the graffiti-adorned Masque, where X spent its early daze. Thanks to this film, images from an important time in the life an important band will linger on.