You don’t have to know the history and love the music of Spanish indie rock icons Los Planetas (“The Planets”) to connect with the new bio-pic about these ’90s fixtures of Spanish “alternative rock.” But it helps.

“Saturn Return” is Spain’s official contender for Best International Feature at the 97th Academy Awards.

Co-directors Isaki Lacuesta and Pol Rodríguez, working from a script by Lacuesta and Fernando Navarro, set out to film the “myth” and “lore” of the band, making their songs their “biography.”

That is how we “interpret” Fleetwood Mac. Why not this Spanish five-piece?

As more than one character, narrating in voice over, relates a scene or sequence of events, and either admits “This isn’t what happened” (in Spanish with English subtitles) or contradicts what the unreliable narrator before him or her just said, that’s problematic from a “just the facts” point of view.

But the story and songs of a guitars-and-keyboards band from Granada, whose singer-songwriter is obssesed with Granada’s native son, the doomed, patriotic poet and playwright Federico García Lorca, kind of lends itself to this mythic treatment, “facts” be damned.

So try not to be bothered by the filmmakers’ obscurant approach — withholding the names of ANY character for over 50 minutes, not naming most of the others. We simply watch and listen to “The Singer” (Daniel Ibáñez of “Terminator: Dark Fate”) compose, narrate and bicker with his fellow guitarist (first-time actor Cristalini) and pick up on the love triangle/”thruple” that original bassist May (Stéphanie Magnin) quit the band to escape.

Or was it their descent into drugs that bugged her more?

The story picks up as that breakup is underway, with May and a drummer departing just as Los Planetas are blowing up — too cool to lip-sync for an insipid Spanish pop music show, seemingly too narcissistic and self-destructive to ever really get along.

They drop Joy Division and “The Velvets” (Velvet Underground) as their inspirations and guiding lights. The singer dreams of recording in New York, and slow-walks their latest LP — “A Week Inside the Motor of a Bus” (Una Semana en el Motor de un Autobus) — almost as an act of protest against their skinflint record company.

Musically and temperamentally, they’re kind of Oasis meets REM with a hint of Weezer and Blink-182.

It takes a bluff, hard-drinking, no-nonsense “futuristic flamenco” drummer (Mafo) to get these mofos on task.

“Typical Granadinos,” May shrugs, every time she hears from the singer, every time she narrates their descent into drugs and drug-fueled violence.

The situations are “indie rock” band-on-the-rise/quarreling-on-tour cliches. We can’t trust what we hear in the narration, and can’t trust what we see — as one character gets his throat slashed, but that’s not his “real” injury. And while the characters are more than “types,” the filmmaking choices made here tend to reduce them to that.

It’s not the most approachable film of this tried-and-true genre, and not all the “artistic” touches benefit the script, even if the players are good enough to create vivid characters in heroin-fueled existential crises lacking names or relationships outside of the band.

But music video cinematographer Takuro Takeuchi makes it all lurid and streetwise, from the streets of Granada to the just-as-mean streets of Manhattan.

And for all the navel gazing and composing, they don’t dare leave out that one moment when creative lightning strikes in the studio. Because nobody’s too good to duck their “Bohemian Rhapsody” moment, here devoted to “Segundo Premio” (“Second Place”) off that New York-recorded third album with a bus engine in the title.

That’s the Spanish title of the film. “Saturn Return” is, I guess, a play on a Spanish “learn your planets” song. Cute. But would you know that if you didn’t know Los Planetas and the culture that created and contributed them to the world music of the ’90s and beyond?

This one has merits, but it’s damned tough to go into without doing a little homework. Or a lot.

Rating: unrated, violence, sex, nudity

Cast: Daniel Ibáñez, Cristalini, Stéphanie Magnin, Mafo, Chesco Ruiz, Daniel Molina,

Credits: Directed by Isaki Lacuesta and Pol Rodríguez, scripted by Isaki Lacuesta and Fernando Navarro. An Outsider Pictures release.

Running time: 1:49