Aaron Aites and Audrey Ewell’s absorbing, low-key documentary “Until the Light Takes Us” recounts how a few Norwegian musicians hijacked an obscure offshoot of heavy metal and made it world famous, by moving from clown paint and anti-Christian imagery into vandalism, church burning and killing. Between interviews, it illustrates the Norwegian context  cold and dark, liberal but ultra-conformist, increasingly globalized  in which these diffident, smart, polite young men came to feel alienated and racially and culturally oppressed.

The film focuses on Varg Vikernes and Gylve Nagell, a Mutt-and-Jeff pairing better known by their black-metal stage names, Count Grishnackh and Fenriz. The doctrinaire Mr. Vikernes is interviewed at the prison in Trondheim where he is serving a maximum sentence for murder and arson; this being Norway, the sentence is 21 years, and colorful curtains hang in the sunny interview room, encapsulating some of the paradoxes of Norwegian rebelliousness.

Image Per Yngve Ohlin, known as Dead, of the band Mayhem in “Until the Light Takes Us.” Credit... Variance Films

Mr. Nagell, who was not implicated in the violence of the early 1990s and continues to make metal music with his band Darkthrone, is introspective and focused on the art. Mr. Vikernes says in grudging praise of Mr. Nagell that he’s “a special person with special goals, and it’s impossible to know what his goals are.”