‘Saturn Return’ Review: Spain’s Oscar Submission Is a Chaotically Honest and Formally Audacious Music Biopic

Cigarette ash piles on top of a few discarded CDs inside a darkened room where the members of a rock band, Los Planetas, struggle to make tracks for their new album. That brief shot conveys more than the mere disarray of the space. Those likely ruined discs symbolize a certain anarchic disregard for music as it exists in its contained, marketable and profitable form. For this group, music only matters as long as it’s pouring from their not-so-hidden inner wounds and taking shape under the influence of drugs and the ferocious dynamic between them. It’s from the chaos — both visible and hidden in their minds — that the songs nurture themselves.

The astounding feat of directors Isaki Lacuesta and Pol Rodríguez’s “Saturn Return” is how it cinematically evokes that intertwined creative and personal turmoil with frantic visual energy and formal audaciousness, refusing to capitulate to any subgenre conventions. From that intoxicating artistic spirit emerges one of the most honest and reinvigorating music biopics in years, a work unconcerned with sanitizing the image of its deeply flawed subjects as it entangles viewers in their self-destructive, poetic and ultimately redemptive battle against their worst impulses.

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While they include are brushes with the fantastical, the filmmakers keep the characters’ feet (mostly) stuck to the ground, where the real terrors of their own making live. Linear inasmuch as it takes audiences from a time of great fiction to a recording session in New York City in the late 1990s, “Saturn” is not at all an origin story. Coming in with background info might render the experience richer, but arriving blind to the party, with no context of who Los Planetas are, won’t hinder how its atmosphere envelops you.

Built from an assortment of loosely connected, vivid vignettes, nightmares and rehearsals (or from “500 pieces” as one of the group’s songs says), “Saturn” is a portrait of a musical act, or more precisely of a three-way friendship, undergoing a death by a thousand cuts as they face an uphill battle to repeat their prior success. The narrative, billed not as a factual account but as surrealism-tinged legend based on real people, finds the band after the triumph of their first album and the failure of the sophomore one. The next one must deliver, or they’ll be cut off from their label. The film’s title in Spanish, “Segundo premio,” refers to the most important track in their third album, “Una semana en el motor de un autobús,” that miraculously comes to fruition over the course of the running time.

No names are used for the pair of protagonists. The credits list them as the Singer (Daniel Ibáñez, seen alongside Javier Bardem in “The Good Boss”) and the Guitarist (played by a real-life musician, whose stage name is Cristalino). The gunglasses-wearing vocalist operates with a put-on façade of disinterest and emotional guardedness. Meanwhile, the heroin-addicted axman’s erratic behavior reveals a weaker psyche under the pressure. For Ibáñez and Cristalino, acting for the first time, the order is tall. Their onscreen bond doesn’t rely on much physical touch, and even less conversation. There’s an almost impenetrable barrier between them that makes it difficult to decipher their needs and motivations in this partnership. Their performances operate between lived-in rawness and the inescapable, nonchalant rockstar aura of the individuals they are playing.

To interject what the two of them can’t say to each other face-to-face, Lacuesta and co-writer Fernando Navarro introduce voiceover narration from the first few frames. That element doesn’t come from a single source, however, but from all the core characters chiming in on the main duo’s love/hate bromance. With the most insight, May (Stéphanie Magnin), the one character called by name and the third core member — the former bassist — who exits Los Planetas right as the movie begins. She speaks of how the Singer and Guitarist unmistakably embody their hometown of Granada. And though the cultural specificity of that may not resonate outside of Spain, one can comprehend the notion of a band reflecting the idiosyncrasies of the city that raised them as people and as artists.

Her observations as a woman once romantically involved with the two of them at the same time, confirm their masculine inability to speak their feelings out loud unless they are veiled in mournful songs. Lyrics eventually appear onscreen, as tracks surface from the hazy darkness of their process — not only as subtitles but in the original Spanish as if the filmmakers had devised the film as a sing-along. No matter who’s speaking, the narration apologetically reminds that these re-created events, which took place in the 20th century, belong to a backwards time that didn’t operate like our modern reality. Those multiple perspectives admit some versions of the events might include lies —a playful self-awareness that drives every aspect of the film, from Takuro Takeuchi’s kinetic camera to the chronological but still fluid assemblage of moments in the editing.

As it chronicles the eroding connection between Singer and Guitarist, about whom we learn nothing in terms of their past, “Saturn Return,” wields the verses of their compositions as our only way in. They stand side by side with so much to confess and thank the other for, yet, as if by incantation, their lips become sealed. Their brotherhood feeds on the intensity of their personalities and the hurt they carry around — the reasons unbeknown to us — that it seems the only way they can show love is by tearing each other apart.

It all builds to a shot near the end, so unshakably beautiful it will stand as the defining image of “Saturn Return,” where the ghostly forms of these two men are superimposed on one another, materializing the concept that a friendship constitutes one shared soul divided into two bodies. There are no comforting embraces much less speeches, but in that one image, the directors confirm that if they were able to create music at all, it was because they were making it for each other, every song a sonic gesture of their mutual, warped, often poisonous devotion for the other.