The story of two Australian brothers who escaped from the rough edge of Melbourne to become superstars, this is a stunning new skateboard documentary from the producers of Senna and Exit Through The Gift Shop.

Except the lives of brothers Tas and Ben Pappas crashed and burned as the celebrity US lifestyle they embraced with ‘new friends in every town’ enveloped them with hauntingly tragic consequences.

In the end, they ended up living the kind of drugs-fuelled lives they would probably have had had they not escaped from their homeland in the first place.

Directed by Eddie Martin and four years in the making, the film is brilliantly knitted together with a remarkable degree of archive footage going back more than 20 years.

At first, it seems like there will only be so many times you can watch boarders whizzing up and down ramps and spinning around.

But the we learn about Tas and and his younger sibling Ben, the more we are sucked into wanting to find out what could possibly happen next to the half-Greek family.

“Mum was hardcore,” Tas recalls. “She would smash dad on the head with a large ashtray and it was like ‘Dad’s dead’. Those are the sort of things we saw growing up.”

Tas is a terrific interviewee, blending typical Australian humour with the kind of lined looks that only a face ‘well’ lived can truly develop.

All This Mayhem recounts stories of ambition, achievements, feuds and disasters, with one contributor saying of Tas that he would would ‘thoroughly burn down bridges and spit in your face’.

But he wasn’t the real problem child. What happens to Ben is a head-spinning account of a talented sportsman completely losing the plot.

If you like this, try Dogtown and Z-Boys (2001), narrated by Sean Penn.