Even by their own standards, The Lonely Island’s new Netflix ‘visual poem’ is a very, very specific piece of work. The Lonely Island Presents: The Unauthorised Bash Brothers Experience is a Beyoncé Lemonade-style collection of thematically-linked music videos detailing the life and career of Jose Canseco and Mark McGwire, two Oakland Athletic baseball players from the 1980s.

Nothing about that previous sentence should work. Especially to British viewers with no exposure to baseball, let alone a pair of players from three decades ago, The Unauthorised Bash Brothers Experience should be an automatic turn-off. So the fact that it not only works, but actively crushes every possible expectation, is perhaps the highest compliment you could ever give The Lonely Island.

This is a dizzying, hilarious half-hour of television. You could go into it blind, as I did, and just let it wash over you. This is an experience on its own. It’s essentially an extended, expensive-looking version of their SNL shorts, beefed up and let loose. It’s bursting with cameos, from Jenny Slate, Haim, Maya Rudolph, Sterling K Brown and Stephanie Beatriz. It’s riddled with the quickfire verbal interplay you get in their albums. And it’s honestly beautiful to look at.

Not only is it full of self-serious, slow-motion, Malickesque visuals and absurd shots of flaming swords and babies trapped in flying orbs, it also drips with whispered faux-profound pronouncements. At one point Andy Samberg stands in a forest, rolling a crystal ball in his hand and whispering “Where do the animals go when the soil has run dry? Where will we hide from the sun when all the trees are dead? I see myself everywhere but here”, and there is literally nothing to separate it from something that might turn up on one of Beyoncé’s albums.

There is literally nothing to separate it from something that might turn up on one of Beyonce’s albums. Photograph: Netflix

However, to fully understand the subject matter you might need to do a little homework. Jose Canseco and Mark McGwire were two players whose gimmick was bumping their forearms together. This so-called ‘Monster Bash’ spawned T-shirts and banners, a novelty music video and a poster of Canseco and McGwire dressed as The Blues Brothers that sold in the tens of thousands. The 1988 US Olympic team even briefly adopted The Monster Bash as their own.

Then came the crash. Canseco wrote a book called Juiced: Wild Times, Rampant ‘Roids, Smash Hits & How Baseball Got Big, detailing the open secret that was their out of control steroid use. Their careers, and their friendship, never recovered.

The Unauthorised Bash Brothers Experience includes the whole arc of this story. In the pulsating, Yeezy-esque Uniform On, we watch Canseco (Samberg) and McGwire (Akiva Schaffer) become so obsessed with steroids that they tear their own bones out. In Bikini Babe Workout, we see them folding their romantic lives into their jobs by benchpressing a number of scantily-clad young women. In IHOP Parking Lot they become overwhelmed by the pressures of fame, represented by a number of women ordering them to shake their bottoms. And, in Daddy, we learn that all this excessive substance abuse was simply a bid for parental approval. And then, right at the end, Jorma Taccone – who stays off-camera for the most part – gets his own showcase in what’s basically the long-awaited sequel to I’m A Hustler.

I know everyone loves Brooklyn Nine-Nine, and that is perfectly understandable. However, it’s always such a thrill to see Samberg unfurl like this and explore the limits of his silly potential. We saw it on SNL. We saw it in Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping. And now, incredibly, we get to see it in The Lonely Island Presents: The Unauthorised Bash Brothers Experience. It is everything Samberg stands for, perfectly condensed into a tight half-hour. Everybody deserves to watch this today.

The Lonely Island Presents: The Unauthorised Bash Brothers Experience is on Netflix now.