Anton Newcombe kicks his fans in the head from the stage. And that is but a mild offense committed by the singer/guitarist/mad-scientist songwriter behind California’s fabulously named Brian Jonestown Massacre, which plays the Mercury Lounge tonight. Director Ondi Timoner’s recent documentary, “DiG!,” was a veritable summary of similar charges – as well as being a hilarious parable about the music industry during the 1990s.

In “DiG!,” Newcombe also takes swings at his bandmates. He refers to himself in the third person and speaks in a groovy, self-idolizing way hijacked from 1967. He flagrantly insults and baits his so-called friends. He sabotages the outfit’s opportunities for success. And he constantly retreats into alcohol and drugs. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Newcombe has renounced the film on the band’s Web site.

But the film, composed of footage collected between 1996 and 2003, makes it clear that music is this man’s entire reason to be. Seeing the highs and (mostly) lows of the band, whose lineup has changed several times – it currently consists of Newcombe, drummer Dan Allaire, guitarist Frankie Teardrop, guitarist Ricky Maymi, and bassist Tommy Dietrick – makes the leader a more attractive figure. “DiG!” fails to capture whatever it is about Newcombe and Jonestown that fuels fans’ adoration – but with any luck it might attract a few new ones.

Tall and lanky with his lively eyes always moving in their sunken sockets, Newcombe’s confident charisma is unflappably alluring onscreen. It’s as easy to understand how a young musician would be sucked into his orbit as it is to appreciate why they eventually drift off. Newcombe’s mind is as active as a restless child’s – but far from stable. His mother left him in juvenile custody when she could no longer control him; his absent, alcoholic father committed suicide on Newcombe’s birthday during filming.

With Jonestown’s 1995 debut “Methodrone,” he unveiled a knack for recreating and referencing 1960s psychedelic and garage sounds, cheekily appropriating that era’s countercultural cool. What makes Jonestown more than a necrophiliac 1960s nostalgia act is how Newcombe riddles these sounds from another time and place with a sensibility that’s very much from this one. On “Wisdom,” interlocking summery guitar fabrics weave a textbook California dream.

Lyrically, Newcombe starts off on that same page. He sings to some unnamed girl about why he’s gone and fallen in love with her, compares his love to a flower – daisies, at that – from which he pulls the petals. “Wisdom” wiggles along like any other feeling groovy ode to the fairer sex until the final verse, when Newcombe informs the object of his affection “you’re the one thing I believe in and / I’ll get my way or I’m going to kill you.” In that line he turns a stereotypical mash note into a patho logical obsession; it’s the sort of juxtaposition that makes Newcombe such a wing nut of a songwriter, peppering his rosy melodies with darker undertones.

The same topsy-turvy ambiguity is evident on 2003’s “And This Is Our Music” – perhaps no place better than on “Prozac vs. Heroin.” This song is one of Newcombe’s typical arrangements: Layers of gentle guitar strum are lavalamp draped across a sleepy-eyed drum haze. Over this mantra bustles Newcombe’s shadowy voice singing a tale of self-reconciliation, his verses asking why bad things always seem to happen to him, his refrains wondering if he will ever know why. He concludes with the stoical shoulder shrug, “They will be done.” Titling this song as a fight between arguably the most popular options of self-medication adds an edge of cynical self-awareness. Newcombe knows he’s best known as an excitable, decadent force. So he rewards such trainspotters looking for druggy excess with the most personally vulnerable song he’s ever written.

If the Brian Jonestown Massacre car wreck captured in “DiG!” – the career roadblocks, the dysfunctional relationships, an ultimate dissolution – borders on “Spinal Tap” cliche, you have to wonder why Newcombe emerges from this portrait as genuinely sympathetic. Sure, he’s an egomaniacal bandleader in search of an audience to love him as much as he loves himself. And the band still sometimes threatens to turn the band into a caricature of itself. But it still can coalesce into a shimmering, organic whole capable of levitating Newcombe’s glistening, shambolic music.