King of comedy: "R.E.M x Buster Keaton's Sherlock Jr"

In the coming days, cinemas across the UK will bear witness to the second stage in an ongoing experiment with the presentation of silent films. Last Hallowe'en, Silents Synced [sic] - an Austin, Texas-based outfit rescoring and rereleasing classic silents paired with noteworthy modern albums - gave us Radiohead x Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horrors; this time round, it's R.E.M x Buster Keaton's Sherlock Jr, where the Athens, Georgia band are represented by songs from 1994's Monster and 1996's New Adventures in Hi-Fi. We are not a million miles away here from the outrage provoked by Giorgio Moroder's pop-promo Metropolis, all told: before the main feature, Synced's resident DJ/director Josh Frank offers a version of Keaton's 1923 short The Balloonatic remixed to Amon Tobin, complete with superimposed ravey visuals and bass-bin pulses, during which you begin to understand why the BFI, for one, hasn't booked these titles. (The bagmen would have a collective coronary, trailing decades of screening notes in their wake.) Not too far, also, from that head at the social gathering who still insists on putting Dark Side of the Moon on at the same time as The Wizard of Oz; nor, indeed, from the visuals projected onto the walls of your nearest hipster drinking establishment. Here are disparate works of art, made in very different eras, pulling your attention in two separate directions; the Silents Synced experience can seem like a movie screening and a listening party happening simultaneously, inviting patrons to try rubbing their stomachs in circles while also patting their heads. In this Balloonatic, you begin to feel Tobin's pounding techno overpowering Buster's deft delicacy: only a few choice sight gags survive the barrage.

The main feature, thankfully, is happier: it serves up a good new print with inventive tinting, and R.E.M's dreamy Americana, even amid this grungier period of their discography, meshes more agreeably with Keaton's vision of life on and adjacent to Main Street. (Frank may have taken the film's epigraph to heart: "Don't try to do two things at once and expect to do justice to both".) It makes sense to lay "How The West Was Won and Where It Got Us" over the opening scenes of Buster's daily graft, and (duh) "I Don't Sleep, I Dream" over our hero's projection-box reveries. Less literal, but no less effective: when Buster first enters the film-within-the-film - only to be almost immediately turfed out again - it's to the squalling, feedback-heavy first minute of "Star 69", and the siren-like guitar effects of "Leave" add an extra dimension to the exploding pool ball business. (A further serendipity, or big break: UK viewers can use this sequence, with its tremendous trick shots, to pay tribute of sorts to the recently deceased John Virgo.) It's canny playlisting above all else: silent cinema brought to you in association with Spotify, heading towards an inspired musical cheat come the final reel. (By which I mean a song that features on neither of the billed albums: you'll know it when you hear it.) The truth is it's another opportunity to sit before - and marvel at - one of the most inventive film comedies of all time; you could probably even play an Olly Murs or Bruno Mars album over the top of Sherlock Jr, and it wouldn't lose any of its vim, vigour or lustre. At the public screening I attended this past Thursday night, it was clear this approach had drawn people out to their local independent cinema - in appalling weather, to boot - to chuckle en masse at a movie made over a century ago. Purists may cavil, but in this economy, that's not nothing.

R.E.M. x Sherlock Jr is now playing in selected cinemas.