This town ain't big enough for both of us
A review requested by Carl, with thanks to supporting Alternate Ending as a donor through Patreon.
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There's nothing unusual about two films with an unplanned resonance with each other coming out at about the same time. Still, there's something awfully particular about one specific pair of films from 2021: two of the relatively small number of directors with an actual visual sensibility, and a small but fiercely dedicated fanbase to go along with it, both made documentaries about their favorite band from the late '60s. And in both cases, one is sorry to say, the results are generic and boring - a very routine, by the books "cradle to grave" documentary narrative told by a collection of talking heads, spiced up by fun but ultimately kind of shallow style. I suppose one has to give the edge to Todd Haynes's The Velvet Underground, inasmuch as a rather staid and lazy film about the New York avant-garde in the 1960s still gets to use footage of and by the New York avant-garde in the 1960s. On the other hand, Edgar Wright's The Sparks Brothers is probably filling the nobler purpose: the Haynes film is basically just selling the Velvet Underground back to people who already love the band, while The Sparks Brothers is a sort of activist project, with Wright using all of his clout to make the argument to his army of fanboys, "I really like this band that never hit as big as they deserved to. I would like for you to like them too. Allow me to play their music for you over the course of the next 141 minutes."
The most obvious shortcoming of The Sparks Brothers is lying right there in that last sentence: this is such a long movie. I don't think it's an ineffective one, to be fair. When I saw this film as part of the online-only 2021 Sundance Film Festival, you could write down what I knew about Sparks - the band in question, which in practice means brothers Ron Mael (keyboards, songwriting) and Russell Mael (vocals) and whomever is playing backup for them at any given moment - on a 3"x5" notecard.* Two-and-a-half years later, I think I could fairly call myself a fan, albeit still a casual one. And that's pretty much entirely because of the film's enormously persuasive argument - an argument which, to recap, largely consists of "seriously, dude, just listen to this". I was eager to begin my Sparks journey within 20 or 30 minutes of starting, so congratulations to Wright: he made it to the extremely tiny list of documentarians who have ever who caused me to alter my behavior. Also, that meant I had about two hours of "yep, you've definitely convinced me, okay, so we're doing more of this, cool."
And so that brings us to the second most obvious shortcoming of The Sparks Brothers: it is repetitive as hell. So are a lot of Sparks songs, but I don't think that was what Wright was going for. There is a very clear structure to how the movie presents its information: a little dramatic flourish about what artistic and professional crossroads thrust them into the creation of whichever album has come up for discussion (at the time of the film's production, they had 25, and while I wasn't precisely counting, I think 21 get talked in some detail), followed by pictures of the album cover. Then, and not necessarily in the same order: an introduction to the album's biggest song or two, which are introduced with white text and a snippet of the OED definition of one keyword from the title; a little animated bit visually illustrating some cute anecdote about the album's creation or promotion; photos of news clippings related to the album's critical reception; straight-on black-and-white talking head interviews shot in 2019 of the Maels themselves (appearing mostly together in a two-shot) or a seemingly infinite list of cool people who love Sparks, with the Maels talking about the grubby reality of creating the album, and the cool people talking in sometimes very overbaked prose about the groundbreaking incredible genius of this particular song or album. Each album gets between 5 and 10 minutes of screentime. Then we go to the next one.
If you just watched any single album-oriented slice of this movie, I think you would walk away fairly believing that it's a riotous delight and worthy of the bright comic energy Wright's name promises. Because there is, in fact, a ton of energy being poured into this. Part of it is simply that Ron and Russell Mael are magnificent interview subjects, with rather sharp comic timing and witty instincts in their own right (part of the legend of Sparks is the humor, sometimes extremely broad and silly, of Ron's lyric-writing), and a clear sense that being lively screen subjects is of much greater importance to their career and Wright's own project than simply being honest and open. So at times, The Sparks Brothers feels almost more like the most deadpan possible stand-up comedy special, with the camera watching two fascinatingly playful septuagenarians riff and banter. At the same time, they're enthusiastic conversationalists, casually tossing out anecdotes both shocking and wholly trivial, offering no apparent concern that they have any secrets to hide about the venality of the music industry and not pretending that they're not a little sore that 50 years of almost nonstop critical acclaim for their work has translated into basically just enough money to live in middle-class anonymity on Los Angeles.
And part of it is, to be sure, is that Wright is looking to be a fun showman in his own right. The frequent return to color, simple cartoon scrawls for historical re-enactments is very flashy. So is the vigorous quick cutting by editor Paul Trewartha, snapping between interviews and images at a frantic clip throughout all of those 141 minutes, as if he and Wright couldn't think of a better way to include all of the huge piles of stuff they wanted to cram into the movie than to run through it at a gallop. It's all very busy and lively and maybe more "fun" in quotes than actually fun, but it is a talking heads documentary, and for it to be entertaining at all is no mean achievement.
And again, just watch an albums' worth, or two, and The Sparks Brothers probably feels like a great translation of Wright's lively nerd-comedy energy into the world of nonfiction. Watch 21 albums' worth, or whatever number it actually is, and it's kind of... I hate to say "numbing". If nothing else, the constant reinvention of Sparks from genre to genre over the decades (another part of the Sparks legend: being years early to all sorts of hip new genres, and only with enormous reluctance and apparently sincere self-loathing repeating themselves once something actually kind of hits commercially) means that the music itself is pretty widely varied. But that list of stylistic elements I gave earlier, that is the list. It never changes up; every new album is discussed in exactly the same way, year after year, decade after decade. Sometimes it picks up speed a bit: it races through the 1980s albums with the slight embarrassment of a fan who thinks of that as the "sell-out" period (followed by the "not producing new music" period, which Wright cleverly patches up through a montage of New Year's Rockin' Eve broadcasts from the band's fallow period around the turn of the '90s), and then through the 2000s albums with the exhaustion of a film director who doesn't want this to break the 2.5-hour mark, and come on, that's the new stuff, we haven't had a chance to grow nostalgic for the new stuff. But that's pretty much the only variable in Wright's approach.
There's also something a bit desperate in the interviews, which I also hate to say (among other things, one of the interview subjects is a personal friend. I don't think that merits the "full disclosure" treatment, but there you have it anyway). The Sparks Brothers has two goals: one is to provide an oral history of 50 years of recording very interesting art-rock, as told by the Maels, their bandmates, the people around them, and the people who were listening to them at the time. The other, I've mentioned, is to beg us to listen to Sparks, so they're not so gosh-darn obscure (and he got what he wanted: between this film and Annette the same year, the Maels have experienced a relative crest in their popularity over the past couple of years, including their first performance at the Hollywood Bowl in July 2023, not three weeks prior to me writing these words). And looking at the army of interview subjects he's called upon to discuss the band's music, it's hard not to feel like The Sparks Brothers is engaged in more special pleading than it needs to be worried about. I mean, the music is right there, and the music is good. Even so, we get wave after wave of the same sentiment: "My God, you would just not even comprehend what a groundbreaking, formally revolutionary thing this song was when it came out. God Himself couldn't produce a more profoundly radical record". And that sentiment - I exaggerate, but only by a bit - is coming from a list of famous people who are being pretty overtly positioned as the authority that Wright wants to appeal to: Beck! Todd Rundgren! Jason Schwartzman! Neil Gaiman! "Weird Al" Yankovic! Björk! Patton Oswalt! Fred Armisen! Jane Wiedlin! Scott Aukerman! Edgar Wright his own self! Not all of those are pure "look at me, I am a famous director who knows famous people" name-dropping (Rundgren produced Sparks' first album; Wiedlin sang on one of their bigger singles and dated Russell Mael), and there are also music journalists and former Sparks members who are clearly offering a less fannish perspective, but it does get a bit noticeable how much of the film consists of assuring you that people you've heard of worshipfully admire this band you haven't heard of.
And that's, you know, fine; I just don't know that I need Beck constantly reassuring me that the incredibly wild and strange-sounding musical artifact I'm currently listening to, in fact, just as wild as my own two ears are telling me it is. Between the "let me tell you how to feel about the music" quality to so many of the interviews, and the extremely rigid, robotic adherence to a certain set of "rules" for using the footage, I get a very strong sense of underconfidence from The Sparks Brothers - and that's understandable, making narrative fiction films and making documentaries aren't really overlapping skills, and Edgar Wright isn't the first person to demonstrate that fact. And the fact remains that the music is so good, and the Maels are such fascinating, weird figures, as invested in elaborating their own mystique and mythology as they are in puncturing it. So I have to admit that I owe the movie something, and that's probably more important than whether or not it does anything meaningfully interesting with documentary form.
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
*The contents of that notecard, for the record, would be "They did an album with Giorgio Moroder that included a song I greatly enjoy", "They did an album that was some kind of Ingmar Bergman homage", "They're collaborating with Leos Carax later in 2021", and "the keyboardist looks like Hitler".
Do you have a movie you'd like to see reviewed? This and other perks can be found on our Patreon page!
There's nothing unusual about two films with an unplanned resonance with each other coming out at about the same time. Still, there's something awfully particular about one specific pair of films from 2021: two of the relatively small number of directors with an actual visual sensibility, and a small but fiercely dedicated fanbase to go along with it, both made documentaries about their favorite band from the late '60s. And in both cases, one is sorry to say, the results are generic and boring - a very routine, by the books "cradle to grave" documentary narrative told by a collection of talking heads, spiced up by fun but ultimately kind of shallow style. I suppose one has to give the edge to Todd Haynes's The Velvet Underground, inasmuch as a rather staid and lazy film about the New York avant-garde in the 1960s still gets to use footage of and by the New York avant-garde in the 1960s. On the other hand, Edgar Wright's The Sparks Brothers is probably filling the nobler purpose: the Haynes film is basically just selling the Velvet Underground back to people who already love the band, while The Sparks Brothers is a sort of activist project, with Wright using all of his clout to make the argument to his army of fanboys, "I really like this band that never hit as big as they deserved to. I would like for you to like them too. Allow me to play their music for you over the course of the next 141 minutes."
The most obvious shortcoming of The Sparks Brothers is lying right there in that last sentence: this is such a long movie. I don't think it's an ineffective one, to be fair. When I saw this film as part of the online-only 2021 Sundance Film Festival, you could write down what I knew about Sparks - the band in question, which in practice means brothers Ron Mael (keyboards, songwriting) and Russell Mael (vocals) and whomever is playing backup for them at any given moment - on a 3"x5" notecard.* Two-and-a-half years later, I think I could fairly call myself a fan, albeit still a casual one. And that's pretty much entirely because of the film's enormously persuasive argument - an argument which, to recap, largely consists of "seriously, dude, just listen to this". I was eager to begin my Sparks journey within 20 or 30 minutes of starting, so congratulations to Wright: he made it to the extremely tiny list of documentarians who have ever who caused me to alter my behavior. Also, that meant I had about two hours of "yep, you've definitely convinced me, okay, so we're doing more of this, cool."
And so that brings us to the second most obvious shortcoming of The Sparks Brothers: it is repetitive as hell. So are a lot of Sparks songs, but I don't think that was what Wright was going for. There is a very clear structure to how the movie presents its information: a little dramatic flourish about what artistic and professional crossroads thrust them into the creation of whichever album has come up for discussion (at the time of the film's production, they had 25, and while I wasn't precisely counting, I think 21 get talked in some detail), followed by pictures of the album cover. Then, and not necessarily in the same order: an introduction to the album's biggest song or two, which are introduced with white text and a snippet of the OED definition of one keyword from the title; a little animated bit visually illustrating some cute anecdote about the album's creation or promotion; photos of news clippings related to the album's critical reception; straight-on black-and-white talking head interviews shot in 2019 of the Maels themselves (appearing mostly together in a two-shot) or a seemingly infinite list of cool people who love Sparks, with the Maels talking about the grubby reality of creating the album, and the cool people talking in sometimes very overbaked prose about the groundbreaking incredible genius of this particular song or album. Each album gets between 5 and 10 minutes of screentime. Then we go to the next one.
If you just watched any single album-oriented slice of this movie, I think you would walk away fairly believing that it's a riotous delight and worthy of the bright comic energy Wright's name promises. Because there is, in fact, a ton of energy being poured into this. Part of it is simply that Ron and Russell Mael are magnificent interview subjects, with rather sharp comic timing and witty instincts in their own right (part of the legend of Sparks is the humor, sometimes extremely broad and silly, of Ron's lyric-writing), and a clear sense that being lively screen subjects is of much greater importance to their career and Wright's own project than simply being honest and open. So at times, The Sparks Brothers feels almost more like the most deadpan possible stand-up comedy special, with the camera watching two fascinatingly playful septuagenarians riff and banter. At the same time, they're enthusiastic conversationalists, casually tossing out anecdotes both shocking and wholly trivial, offering no apparent concern that they have any secrets to hide about the venality of the music industry and not pretending that they're not a little sore that 50 years of almost nonstop critical acclaim for their work has translated into basically just enough money to live in middle-class anonymity on Los Angeles.
And part of it is, to be sure, is that Wright is looking to be a fun showman in his own right. The frequent return to color, simple cartoon scrawls for historical re-enactments is very flashy. So is the vigorous quick cutting by editor Paul Trewartha, snapping between interviews and images at a frantic clip throughout all of those 141 minutes, as if he and Wright couldn't think of a better way to include all of the huge piles of stuff they wanted to cram into the movie than to run through it at a gallop. It's all very busy and lively and maybe more "fun" in quotes than actually fun, but it is a talking heads documentary, and for it to be entertaining at all is no mean achievement.
And again, just watch an albums' worth, or two, and The Sparks Brothers probably feels like a great translation of Wright's lively nerd-comedy energy into the world of nonfiction. Watch 21 albums' worth, or whatever number it actually is, and it's kind of... I hate to say "numbing". If nothing else, the constant reinvention of Sparks from genre to genre over the decades (another part of the Sparks legend: being years early to all sorts of hip new genres, and only with enormous reluctance and apparently sincere self-loathing repeating themselves once something actually kind of hits commercially) means that the music itself is pretty widely varied. But that list of stylistic elements I gave earlier, that is the list. It never changes up; every new album is discussed in exactly the same way, year after year, decade after decade. Sometimes it picks up speed a bit: it races through the 1980s albums with the slight embarrassment of a fan who thinks of that as the "sell-out" period (followed by the "not producing new music" period, which Wright cleverly patches up through a montage of New Year's Rockin' Eve broadcasts from the band's fallow period around the turn of the '90s), and then through the 2000s albums with the exhaustion of a film director who doesn't want this to break the 2.5-hour mark, and come on, that's the new stuff, we haven't had a chance to grow nostalgic for the new stuff. But that's pretty much the only variable in Wright's approach.
There's also something a bit desperate in the interviews, which I also hate to say (among other things, one of the interview subjects is a personal friend. I don't think that merits the "full disclosure" treatment, but there you have it anyway). The Sparks Brothers has two goals: one is to provide an oral history of 50 years of recording very interesting art-rock, as told by the Maels, their bandmates, the people around them, and the people who were listening to them at the time. The other, I've mentioned, is to beg us to listen to Sparks, so they're not so gosh-darn obscure (and he got what he wanted: between this film and Annette the same year, the Maels have experienced a relative crest in their popularity over the past couple of years, including their first performance at the Hollywood Bowl in July 2023, not three weeks prior to me writing these words). And looking at the army of interview subjects he's called upon to discuss the band's music, it's hard not to feel like The Sparks Brothers is engaged in more special pleading than it needs to be worried about. I mean, the music is right there, and the music is good. Even so, we get wave after wave of the same sentiment: "My God, you would just not even comprehend what a groundbreaking, formally revolutionary thing this song was when it came out. God Himself couldn't produce a more profoundly radical record". And that sentiment - I exaggerate, but only by a bit - is coming from a list of famous people who are being pretty overtly positioned as the authority that Wright wants to appeal to: Beck! Todd Rundgren! Jason Schwartzman! Neil Gaiman! "Weird Al" Yankovic! Björk! Patton Oswalt! Fred Armisen! Jane Wiedlin! Scott Aukerman! Edgar Wright his own self! Not all of those are pure "look at me, I am a famous director who knows famous people" name-dropping (Rundgren produced Sparks' first album; Wiedlin sang on one of their bigger singles and dated Russell Mael), and there are also music journalists and former Sparks members who are clearly offering a less fannish perspective, but it does get a bit noticeable how much of the film consists of assuring you that people you've heard of worshipfully admire this band you haven't heard of.
And that's, you know, fine; I just don't know that I need Beck constantly reassuring me that the incredibly wild and strange-sounding musical artifact I'm currently listening to, in fact, just as wild as my own two ears are telling me it is. Between the "let me tell you how to feel about the music" quality to so many of the interviews, and the extremely rigid, robotic adherence to a certain set of "rules" for using the footage, I get a very strong sense of underconfidence from The Sparks Brothers - and that's understandable, making narrative fiction films and making documentaries aren't really overlapping skills, and Edgar Wright isn't the first person to demonstrate that fact. And the fact remains that the music is so good, and the Maels are such fascinating, weird figures, as invested in elaborating their own mystique and mythology as they are in puncturing it. So I have to admit that I owe the movie something, and that's probably more important than whether or not it does anything meaningfully interesting with documentary form.
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
*The contents of that notecard, for the record, would be "They did an album with Giorgio Moroder that included a song I greatly enjoy", "They did an album that was some kind of Ingmar Bergman homage", "They're collaborating with Leos Carax later in 2021", and "the keyboardist looks like Hitler".
