Some kids dug the beat and found it “easy to dance to….” just so long as you knew The Robot.

The cool kids loved the performance art kitsch of it all, groups of five dressing up in yellow ponchos or garbage bags with flower pots on their heads at costume parties.

“Are we not MEN?”

And the smart kids? Maybe they got it. A year or two of college, that first exposure to “Dadaism,” taking a minute or two to ponder “In the beginning was the end,” they were “people that wanted to know why we were saying the things we were.”

And what “Devo,” “the Band that Fell to Earth” was saying — after “Listen up, you spuds” — was words of warning about a culture in decline, a populace dumbed down by reactionary politics and money-uber-alles media promoting gridlock blocking big solutions to big problems that were glaringly obvious by the late ’60s and early ’70s.

“We’re not cynical at all,” Gerald “Jerry” Casale might quip in a TV interview. “We just watch the news.”

The latest documentary from “Tiger King” director Chris Smith is a deep dive into Devo, the “de-evolution” prophets whose mechanical, quick and jerky electronic pop and dark and adorable music videos dominated the early MTV era.

Smith lets the band co-founders Mark Mothersbaugh and Casale expound on the philosophy behind the performance art of this most “visual” of New Wave bands — that humans are “mutant apes” descended from the apes who ate the brains of other apes and are thus more “devolved” than “evolved,” and doomed to dumb down as the limits of evolution become obvious.

“Devo” takes us back to 1970 Kent State University, where Mothersbaugh and Casale met and bonded just in time to live through the Vietnam War protests and Kent State Massacre carried out by the National Guard, sent there by Nixon-backing Ohio governor Jim Rhodes.

If you lived through that and didn’t figure out the country was “devolving,” you didn’t want to see it.

We follow the band’s birth and formation, track through intentionally off-putting and “punishing” early shows, and pick up on a series of unlikely “Big Breaks” — catching the attention of David Bowie, a record deal, a “Saturday Night Live” appearance, and then music fans “misinterpreting” the meaning of “Whip It,” causing the band to lean into the masturbation analogy, to hilarious video effect.

Mothersbaugh and especially Casale, both of whom enlisted siblings to join the cause/band, came off then and come off now as the Smartest Guys in the Room — witty, thoughtful artists looking for an outlet for their visual and philosophical ideas and finding it in a band.

They got there before Talking Heads. They made music videos and avant garde films before MTV ever existed.

And they spoke and speak in movie analogies — “Island of Lost Souls,” “Metropolis,” “Inherit the Wind.” Casale, billed as Gerald V. Casale, directed their music videos and “films” and branched out to do that for other bands from The Cars and Soundgarden to Rush, and even TV commercials.

All this attention to seriocomic philosophy, politics, an unlikely obscurity to success story and “film as a part of (their) visual aesthetic” points to the film’s only serious shortcoming.

As somebody who’s interviewed Mark Mothersbaugh about his extensive film scoring career — “The Lego Movie,” “Minecraft Movie,” back to “Rushmore,” “The Royal Tennenbaums” and “Pee Wee’s Playhouse” — I wanted to hear how these guys learned their instruments, created their “sound” and learned to play. So fast. So very fast.

But the laugh-out-loud appearances — not just performing music but “performing” interviews — more than compensate for missing “It used to be about the MUSIC, man.”

That makes “Devo” a delight, even if you were never into the band, even if you weren’t in on the joke.

Rating: TV-MA, profanity,

Cast: Mark Mothersbaugh, Jerry Casale, Robert Mothersbaugh, Bob Casale, Jim Mothersbaugh, Neil Young, Brian Eno and David Bowie.

Credits: Directed by Chris Smith. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:31