MOVIES : The Hughes One-Two Punch : Don’t count on meticulous history, a linear plot or even a happy ending. These <i> Wunderkind </i> filmmakers go for a simple swift kick to the gut and music that packs a wallop.

Five years younger than Steven Spielberg when he made “Jaws” and George Lucas when he made “American Graffiti,” the twin brother directors Allen and Albert Hughes, at 23, are already making history, a subject they had little use for as students. Refugees from both high school and film school, the Hugheses vaulted from directing rap videos straight into Hollywood two years ago on the strength of the successful New Line drive-by feature “Menace II Society.”

Now, they’re back with their first big studio movie (for Disney of all places), a tough-minded Vietnam-era coming-of-age tale set in the South Bronx called “Dead Presidents,” opening Wednesday.

The rough equivalent of ballplayers their age going straight to the majors after a season in Double A, the brothers Hughes are filmmaking phenoms, to be sure--talented, cocky, irreverent and no doubt soon to be rich. They embody two new waves in Hollywood: the loose school of African American filmmakers chronicling the blight of urban neighborhoods to the sound of hip-hop, and the twentysomething post-literate generation for whom music is at least as important to a movie as its story and script.

“I think sound overall is 50% of a movie--sound effects, music, all of it,” says Allen.

“People are so stuck in the three-act structure,” says Albert. “We want to get out of that. We want to make a movie one day where there are no rules at all--something like Pink Floyd’s ‘The Wall’ or Disney’s ‘Fantasia,’ all these things crossed into one. Some crazy non-linear movie that deals with anything you want.”

Albert has another idea. “With most movies, audiences know the main character is not going to get shot and die. But maybe he should. Maybe he should die in the middle of the picture. Let somebody else star in the mother------.”

Oh, yes, the Hughes brothers are also generously profane and sometimes a challenge to quote verbatim.

In their Underworld Entertainment offices on the Sunset Strip in West Hollywood hangs an enlarged photograph of the two of them lounging in director’s chairs while shooting the finger at the camera. The picture is on the wall alongside a framed gold record for the soundtrack of “Menace II Society” and movie posters for their favorite films, including “Scarface,” “Apocalypse Now” and “Once Upon a Time in America.” (They quote from Sergio Leone films the way others quote from Shakespeare and the Bible.)

The brothers have driven in separately from their respective houses in Pomona and are in an upstairs room seated in front of a television screen, staring at the surreal image of the bullet-headed Isaac Hayes in a black suit hiking across a sand-blown Mojave lake bed while lip-syncing his version of the elegantly languorous 1960s hit “Walk on By.”

This is the first music video spun from the soundtrack to “Dead Presidents,” and they seem as happy to be watching it now as when they first discovered the song while culling period music for the picture. Both the original version, sung by Dionne Warwick, and Hayes’ orchestral cover on his 1969 “Hot Buttered Soul” LP were released before the Hugheses were born.

“Because we’re still really young, we’re still uncovering a lot of stuff right now,” says Albert, the somewhat leaner of the twins, both of whom have shaved heads in the style pioneered by, well, Isaac Hayes. Allen is beefier and wears an earring. Both are dressed in powder-blue jeans and different colored T-shirts. (Neither of the brothers is married; Allen has a son, 4 years old, and Albert has an 18-month-old daughter.)

“He has his collection of CDs,” Albert says, pointing to Allen, “and I have mine and we listen to them and start marking up the tracks that just sound funky and like the groove that we want, and then when it gets down to the script and the movie, we make a compilation tape. The hard part is when we get down to checking the year because you go, ‘Oh s---,’ most of these great songs came in ’75 and ’76.” In other words, too late to fit the time frame of the film. “So we had to push the year of the movie up just to get to these great songs.”

The soundtrack of “Dead Presidents” includes parts of 36 vintage soul songs from the ‘60s and early ‘70s, from Curtis Mayfield, Al Green, James Brown, Aretha Franklin, the Spinners and Barry White, not to mention from the sound of “Shaft” himself, Mr. Hayes.

“We went over a million dollars on the songs,” Allen says. “That wasn’t anticipated by the studio.”

Returning his attention to the music video on screen, which now includes scene fragments from the film juxtaposed with Hayes’ dreamy desert lamentation, Albert says, “When we used it in the movie, we edited the scene to the song.” As they did with another Hayes ‘60s cover, “The Look of Love.” “Those things were designed before anything was designed in the movie, before anything else was thought of. We knew those songs were going to be in it.”

Something about the mood of the songs, their place in pop culture time, the scenes they could inspire. “We feel music more than we feel anything else,” Allen says.

A s co-producers and co-direc tors of their films, the brothers work very much in concert. (The have help on the business side from Darryl Porter, a former entertainment attorney who is now president of their company.) Allen focuses more on the actors and Albert more on cameras and the technical side, but both emphasize that the division of labor is only a vague one.

They developed “Dead Presidents” from a short story they found in “Bloods,” an anthology of stories about the experiences of black soldiers in and out of Vietnam. They hired Michael Henry Brown to write the screenplay and then cast Larenz Tate, who played the homicidal O-Dog in “Menace,” to play the leading role of Anthony, a good kid who enlists in the Marines after high school in 1969, is sent to the front lines in Vietnam and returns four years later to his South Bronx neighborhood unappreciated and unable to get a job. Crime awaits him.

The title, “Dead Presidents,” is taken from a street term for cash, the object of Anthony’s struggle for survival.

The film recalls some elements of “Born on the Fourth of July,” Oliver Stone’s adaptation of gung-ho young Marine Ron Kovic’s disillusionment with the war and then his country.

But as the Hughes brothers see it, things were even worse for guys like Anthony. “He’s a nice guy, but he doesn’t have all the information,” is the way Allen puts it. “It goes to show that even if you’re nice, the best person in the world, it doesn’t mean you’re going to get a break. Nine times out of 10, nice guys do finish last. Especially if you’re black or Hispanic or whatever, your country will f--- you in the end.”

Politically the Hughes brand themselves as “leftists.” Says Allen, “There’s nothing really to be proud of in this country, we feel, until we start changing the old ways.” “Yeah,” says Albert, thinking maybe of the surging GOP and the Christian Coalition. “And they want to go backward, more religion.”

Though far from making the kind of films likely to please Bob Dole, the Hugheses have not reveled in violence for its own sake. Still, in the Vietnam section of “Dead Presidents” (filmed in Florida) there are some nasty combat scenes and a particularly gruesome shot of a soldier disemboweled by the Viet Cong, his genitalia mutilated and stuffed in his mouth. Albert defends the shot.

“Overall, the response has been, ‘I don’t like it, why’d you put it in?’ ” he says. “I’m actually happy to hear that. I feel a . . . responsibility in a way--and I don’t like to use that word ‘responsibility’ with a movie--that the stuff should be real-looking. It happened. This kind of thing happened. If you want to turn your head from it, go ahead, that’s your choice. That’s one thing the MPAA [ratings board] doesn’t realize, is that people always cover their eyes.”

Later, during an interview with an HBO crew that has come by to tape a segment about “Dead Presidents,” Albert is asked about their predilection for dark subject matter. He responds: “Why does every main character have to be a good character and every movie have to have a happy ending?”

Asked about their place among contemporary black filmmakers, he says: “We’re not part of black cinema, if you’re talking about movies that set out to make black people look better.”

“We don’t want to be compared to every other black filmmaker,” Allen says.

“Our films are not alike in any way,” Albert says, meaning the films of John Singleton and Spike Lee, whose names have been mentioned. “If you want to label it a movement, it really hasn’t even developed yet. It’s a complete myth. You know the weird thing is, if you’d put all these black film-makers in one room, you’d see that every one of them has a jealousy problem with each other.”

John Singleton came out of USC Film School and Spike Lee came out of NYU. The Hughes brothers come out of Detroit. “My mother once said, ‘Someday we’re gonna move out West,’ ” Allen recalls. When the boys were 9 years old, Aida Hughes, who is of Armenian descent, followed through on her promise, leaving both Detroit and their father behind to settle in Pomona. “My dad was on the street when he was 13 years old,” Allen says. “He dabbled in the ‘pimptorial’ arts. He was a hustler. My dad’s a good person and I don’t want to talk down on him, but Mom raised us.”

Mom got a job at an In-N-Out Burger stand, and the three of them moved into an integrated neighborhood. Says Albert, “I remember her taking us to the welfare office, and she goes, ‘OK, I’ve never asked you guys to lie before, but if they ask you if we have a car, you got to tell them we don’t have a car.’ And we go, ‘OK.’ ”

Their mother got off welfare within three years by starting her own business, a vocational rehabilitation company for workers hurt on the job. When her sons were 12 she bought a video camera for the business and let them borrow it. She never got it back.

“From Day One, we made little movies,” Albert says. They copied scenes from films they admired and had watched over and over again.

Self-taught, they started editing at home on two VCRs and eventually moved on to the professional equipment provided by their local cable access station.

“In our 11th-grade year,” Albert says about high school in neighboring Claremont, “we figured there was nothin’ new they could teach us, it’s the same bull----. We hated all the teachers. I sat in that history class for so long. . . . I know a few things about Columbus and all that other bull----. But they could have been teaching me some real s---.”

“We knew what we wanted to do,” adds Allen. “It was no mystery. It wasn’t like, ‘Are we going to be a doctor or are we going to be a lawyer?’ We knew we wanted to make films, we just didn’t know what capacity it would be in.”

On the third floor of the Roy O. Disney Building at Disney world headquarters in Burbank, the brothers assemble in the office of Terry Press, Disney’s senior vice president in charge of marketing. They are here to discuss the studio’s planned 60-second TV spot for “Dead Presidents” and matters related to their upcoming two-week national publicity tour that will carry them to the New York Film Festival.

“Are you guys going to be nice?” Press asks them, aware that the two have a tendency to say things like, “Spike Lee, until [cinematographer] Ernest Dickerson left him, was really a good technical director.”

“Hey,” says Allen, who is scarfing a commissary-provided sandwich on this busy day. “Is it OK if we wear some Mickey Mouse T-shirts? I’ve always wanted to wear one of those things.”

The banter is a temporary bridge over a more serious matter in Allen’s mind. Though he says Disney has been great to work with and in no way interfered with the film they wanted to make, he’s worried the studio doesn’t like the Isaac Hayes video of “Walk on By” that will be part of the 60-second spot. The Hal David/Burt Bacharach song is slow--and old--and Disney’s current hit film, “Dangerous Minds,” though a critical bomb, has a pounding soundtrack of up-to-the-minute pop that is ruling the Billboard charts and undoubtedly has boosted box office.

Allen looks right at Press and says, “Tell me, is there a problem with the video? Because I’m getting this feeling. . . .”

Press quietly says there is no problem with the video. “Because everybody who’s seen the movie that we’ve talked to,” Allen continues, “has liked that song. I know I’m right about this. This is marketing, right? You don’t have to like this stuff.”

“We’re going to use the part of the song,” Press says calmly, “with the guitar riff that goes . . . “ and here she imitates a fuzz-tone guitar line from Hayes’ “Walk on By.”

The brothers seem placated.

“Can you get us on Leno?” Allen asks. “We were on Leno last time.”

“No, you weren’t,” an aide reminds him. “You were on Arsenio.”

“Oh,” Allen says.

‘Twenty-three, it’s mislead ing,” says Keith David, the experienced actor (“Platoon,” “Bird”) and Juilliard graduate who plays the role of Kirby, a tough but fatherly bookie in “Dead Presidents,” and who also has a role in Spike Lee’s “Clockers.” “We tend to compartmentalize people and especially when it comes to chronology: ‘You can’t know such and such when you’re 23.’ Not true.” David is 39. “These boys were very clear about what they wanted and I trusted them.

“And the mark of any good general is to surround yourself with people who can pick up the slack.”

Certainly the brothers had more help this time out, even with a relatively modest $15-million budget. On their first film they didn’t even have a production designer. This time they not only had a production designer, they had the assistance of a Grammy-winner, composer Danny Elfman, to write the score.

Says Allen: “There are some scenes that weren’t emotionally what we wanted them to be and when he came in and did his thing, it was a totally different thing.

“I gotta say, I don’t think we’ve yet mastered storytelling. I don’t think our interests lie in storytelling. I think we’re better at vignettes, little scenes.

“I think of ‘Dead Presidents’ more like a concept album,” Albert says. “Like ‘Inner City Blues’ or Marvin Gaye’s ‘What’s Going On?’ All these social songs.

“I feel like we’re going like this to America,” he adds, balling his fist and punching the air. “We just want to go boom and hit it with a low blow. Just so they know. Deal with it for six weeks.”

“Oliver Stone does that,” Allen says.

“Art is about feeling, and Oliver has grasped that and he knows how to give you that feeling,” Albert says. “It doesn’t matter what else.”

“He’s overbearing though,” Allen says. “We’re subtle.”

“Not real subtle,” Albert says.

“I think so,” Allen says.