What kind of misfit micro-metropolis is Oklahoma City? Judging from "The Fearless Freaks," Bradley Beesley's new portrait of OKC's leading musical export, the Flaming Lips, everyone in town must have intimate contact with the criminal justice system. A brother in jail, a crack fiend on the corner, a mom-and-pop drug dealership operating in the garage -- it's all routine for a band whose members appear to be typical neighborhood kids.

SHOUT FILMS 'The Fearless Freaks' 3 out of 5 stars Showing at the Alamo Village Friday, April 15 through Thursday, April 21. [an error occurred while processing this directive]

Beesley, who moved from Oklahoma to Austin three years ago, is a longtime friend of the band who has been filming them (for music videos and as a hobby) for more than a decade. As a result, his documentary has a familiar vibe that captures plenty of day-in-the-life local color while making sense of a career born in chaos.

By most accounts, the band should never have survived long enough to grow into one of America's most critically adored groups. Early shows succeeded mostly out of a violent, try-anything spirit, but Beesley spends enough time with frontman Wayne Coyne to show how much of the Lips' success is due to his old-fashioned, hardcore work ethic.

It helps, of course, that Coyne has a knack for turning concerts into avant-garde crowd pleasers. The film shows some of these (many in Austin), like the event in a parking garage where dozens of car radios were turned into a Flaming Lips orchestra. Spectacles like that are a nice balance to memoirs of the days Coyne spent as a fry cook at Long John Silver's.

There's a harrowing sequence late in the film in which drummer Steven Drozd reveals the extent to which drugs have endangered the band's existence: On camera, he prepares a dose of heroin while he matter-of-factly recounts the birth of his addiction.

After that, the movie can't really return to its happy-go-lucky vibe. It begins to conform to the "Behind the Music" formula, heaping praise upon the band leader while reassuring us of Drozd's well-being. Fans might wish that Beesley could wrap things up with more of the psychedelic flair demonstrated in the opening clips, but that doesn't keep the film from being a solid introduction to a famously unstable band.