This is a nearly two and a half hour long documentary about a musical duo that I’ve never heard of and you probably haven’t either. But it was directed by Edgar Wright and it’s listed as one of the best films of last year so that’s enough to get me onboard. This duo consisting of two brothers have been around for a while and while they have a large cult following, they have never achieved success on a global scale. This supremely entertaining film strives to serve as a comprehensive record of their career and tries to show that they have had an outsized influence on other artistes that you will have heard about.

Structurally this film is pretty much like any other biopic of creative artists, beginning with how the brothers Ron and Russell Mae were raised and how they came to be musicians. It sure is convenient that the two are brothers and they have never had musical careers apart from each other so the whole thing is a single, coherent narrative. It took a while for them to adopt the name Sparks and before that they performed under a variety of band names since their college days. Other band members come and go at different times as well, especially when they tried to develop their career in the UK and then returned to their native Los Angeles, so only the two of them are the real Sparks. As attested by other musicians, producers who had worked with them and other icons of culture, they achieved local success in LA and even appeared on popular television shows. Yet every time they seem poised to finally break it big, the brothers release a new album that is totally different from the previous one and interest in them peters out again. The defining attributes of the duo is the constant drive to be creative, to never repeat themselves or merely copy what others are doing and their heavy use of humor in their music. This leaves their audience unsure about how seriously to take them and indeed, as the interviewees here note, they are frequently thought of as being a joke band or an act put together just for a movie rather than as a real band.

I’m not a music enthusiast at all and I don’t have any expertise in how good they are as musicians. This film is also too long for me so I found it dragging in the middle. The documentary wants to comprehensively cover their career and the circumstances around each of their albums which is just too much detail for me. I will note that I did like the snippets of their music that is featured and it truly is astounding how reminiscent their work often sounds of music by more famous acts you have heard of. Some musical acts acknowledge the influence Sparks had on their work but others don’t and it’ll take someone with more knowledge of the music scene than me to properly judge if they are the true innovators or if they are following established trends. For example in the 1980s, they made music that sound very teenybopper but still in their irreverent mocking tone. The film itself is superb in being very entertaining and the duo themselves are undoubtedly weirdly interesting people and pretty much the perfect subjects for a documentary.

I do note that while the documentary provides plenty of information about their childhood and their musical careers, nothing is revealed about their personal lives as adults. Ron Mael even uses humor to deflect a question from Wright about his sexual orientation. They have every right to do so of course but it is notable how assiduous they are about keeping their real private lives private given how flamboyant their stage personas are. I’m also fascinated by what this film reveals of their daily routines. Their music is all about being constant reinvention and being endlessly creative. But they treat the creation of the music as work that is done by adhering to the fixed and regular routines that they have honed together over the decades. I also like this film makes it clear that they do crave commercial success and acknowledgment and they do love performing in front of giant audiences. But they also realize that their music is what it is and won’t work for everyone but they’re still going to do things their way.

After watching this, we of course listened to some of their music on Spotify. While a lot of their work is indeed very nice to listen to, it’s also kind of understandable why they never clicked with a wider audience. Barring certain songs like The Number One Song in Heaven which is one of their most successful hits, relatively few of their songs are immediately catchy and memorable at least to those without trained musical ears like me. You can see why they are sometimes known as the favorite musicians of other musicians. As for this documentary itself, Wright does a wonderful job at making it lively and entertaining but this really is a film for other musical enthusiasts as it is just so long and detailed and would test the patience of everyone else.