Starring the Dandy Warhols and the Brian Jonestown Massacre. Rating unavailable.

The band in This Is Spinal Tap was fake, while the Metallica of Some Kind of Monster was all too real. The subjects of DiG!, a well-assembled twin biography of the Dandy Warhols and the Brian Jonestown Massacre, fall somewhere in between. The groups in question have all the delusions of a zillion-selling outfit mixed with the delusions of people who are either making it up as they go along or suspect they've been made up by someone else.

The post-postmodernism of these outfits is evident in their names: while BJM founder and bully-in-chief Anton Newcombe is in thrall to Rolling Stone Brian Jones--he does everything dumb here--Courtney Taylor-Taylor, the head Dandy, sports a knowing, if barely perceptible, sneer, much like a certain white-wigged art maven of yore. It's perhaps natural that two such self-conscious fellows should develop duelling charismas, and what starts out as a creative rivalry turns into a kind of pas de deux to the death--for Newcombe anyway, as he watches his rivals enjoy the kind of success, over the course of the 1990s, that his band will never achieve.

The fact is that neither group is quite talented, together, original, or whatever (marketable?) enough to really break into the ranks of the big sellers. Their middleweight status--BJM prolific, daring, and self-destructive; the Warhols disciplined, accessible, and kind of boring--is part of what makes their rags-to-rags tale so interesting.

It helps, too, on the level of sheer entertainment, that Newcombe--who fires band members between hits of heroin--is such a megalomaniacal nut case. When a former A & R person explains how she set up an industry showcase for the BJMs for what could have been a million-dollar deal with Elektra Records, and that the Viper Room show turned into "a disaster", you expect to hear about bloated egos and out-of-tune guitars. But director Ondi Timoner's camera, on hand sporadically for seven gruelling if sometimes hilarious years, is there to catch a show that ends with the band in a heap on-stage.

"You broke my fucking sitar, motherfucker," Newcombe later complains. He also says he's "all about the love", not money. This kind of love, although not exactly fake, definitely ain't free.