Happy holidays from the Lips

Some seven years in the making, the Flaming Lips’ “Christmas on Mars” can finally take its place alongside Bob Dylan’s “Renaldo and Clara,” Neil Young’s “Human Highway” and the Beatles’ “Magical Mystery Tour” in the dubious pantheon of rock-star-authored motion pictures. The film, which gets a television premiere tonight on Sundance Channel, isn’t especially good, but it’s the sort of thing some viewers will call “great,” perhaps adding a “whoa” or a “dude.” I myself will admit to a certain hair-tousling affection for this sort of thing, and the case at hand is not the worst of them. (That would be “Magical Mystery Tour.”)

Shot in 16-millimeter, mostly in black and white, this is an old-fashioned “art film” -- a kind of folk-art film -- made under the influence (I would guess) of films like “Eraserhead,” “Red Desert,” “Alphaville” and “2001: A Space Odyssey,” another slow movie in which very little happens. Like a lot of films in which the symbols (floating balls of light, fetuses, various suggestions of female genitalia) are less obscure in the mind of the filmmakers than they are on the screen, “Christmas on Mars” is better, and less apparently random, when watched a second time -- it does have structure, and a point.

The action -- to use a word too strong for what happens over most of the film’s 80-plus minutes -- occurs in a deteriorating space station on Mars, where the colonists, suffering from extraterrestrial cabin fever, are about to celebrate their first Christmas. Lips drummer Steven Drozd plays Major Syrtis, who spends the film wandering from place to place, occasionally hallucinating (there is a lot of that going around) and attempting to arrange a holiday party. Drozd is not bad, and he has an actor’s looks (which change slightly, according to which scenes were shot during his heroin addiction and which after).

Head Lip Wayne Coyne, who wrote the film and co-directed it with Bradley Beesley and George Salisbury, appears as a Martian, sporting the traditional antennae and dressed like something out of “Flash Gordon”; he arrives in a flaming ball of light that recalls the big plastic bubble in which Coyne crowd surfs at Flaming Lips shows. (The band has also explored the Santa/aliens theme onstage.) The only woman in the film (J. Michelle Martin-Coyne) is about to give birth to a baby gestating outside her body in a plastic bubble of its own; she feeds it through a hose screwed into her stomach. I believe this represents, in the spirit of the season, a sort of technological virgin birth.

Largely made at and around Coyne’s Oklahoma City home, “Christmas on Mars” has an “I’ve got a camera and your uncle has a grain elevator -- let’s make a movie” quality to it, though it’s been well shot and (not surprisingly) well scored. The surplus-store quality of the space station sets actually makes them more effective, and the supporting cast includes a few ringers -- former “Blues Clues” host Steve Burns, Adam Goldberg, Fred Armisen from “Saturday Night Live” -- who can act.

It’s hard to tell to what degree the film is meant to be heavy (“We’re just little specks of dust floating through a vast sea of infinity”) and how much is meant to mock heaviness. While I am sure there were cries of “Man, that would be hilarious” in the course of its creation -- it features a Martian in a Santa suit, after all -- Coyne does seem to want to say something about hope. Whatever else this is, it is a real Christmas movie.

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robert.lloyd@latimes.com

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‘Christmas on Mars’

Where: Sundance

When: Midnight

Rating: Not rated