BAND OF BROTHERS.(The Talk of the Town)

Nat and Alex Wolff, the brothers in the Naked Brothers Band, have been working together for five years, since the evening they got out of the bathtub and began singing and jumping around. Eventually, they got dressed, picked up instruments, and, along with a few friends, started playing neighborhood gigs. Nat, who is twelve and is known as "the girl magnet," is the singer, songwriter, and piano man; Alex, nine, plays drums. Their big single, which Nat wrote when he was six, is called "Crazy Car." As a nine-year-old female fan remarked the other day, "I like it because it's about a love that leads you nowhere."

Nat and Alex live with their parents, the jazz pianist Michael Wolff and the actress Polly Draper, on lower Fifth Avenue. Two and a half years ago, Draper decided that it would be funny to make a film about them. The result, a winsome, relatively ungoofy, half-made-up chronicle of the boys' exploits--"Spinal Tap" meets Our Gang--was picked up by Nickelodeon, which then signed the boys on for a TV series. The movie airs Saturday; the show begins next week. It parodies fame, and probably dooms them to it. Here's a prediction: Nat makes the cover of Tiger Beat, if not Rolling Stone, by year's end.

The tricky thing with the Naked Brothers is figuring out what's real and what's not. On the show and in the movie, for example, their father, as played by their father, is a dorky accordionist who is desperate to join the band. In real life, he's got his own thing going on. And on TV the boys are motherless; Draper, who writes and directs most of the episodes, thought the show would be better off without a mother imposing order on the kids' rock-star idyll. Nat and Alex, though, seem to be pretty much what you see on TV: Nat, a lanky treble with a sunny stage manner and a Paul McCartney mullet, is the pop-hook prodigy, and Alex, with long curly hair and fake tattoos, is the imp--Ringo, by way of Alex Van Halen.

"A lot of the time when I get recognized, and I have been recognized like five times, people think I'm my character," Nat said one night last week.

"Well, you are your character," Draper said.

"I know, but they don't make the distinction."

"They never do," Wolff said.