140 min | R | June 18, 2021 | Focus Features
Ron and Russell Mael make pop records for fifty years and stay famous mostly among other musicians. Edgar Wright corners every fan he can find and dares you to keep up with the catalog. It is a love letter written by someone who memorized the whole thing.
Ron Mael and Russell Mael have made pop music together for fifty years under the name Sparks. Almost nobody can tell you a single song. Edgar Wright builds a documentary around that exact paradox. The film tracks a band that influences everyone and sells to almost no one, two brothers who reinvent their sound every album and refuse to cash in on any of it. It is about artistic survival without commercial reward, and about why a cult stays a cult.
Ron Mael sits at the keyboard with a tiny mustache and a stone face and lets that contradiction do the work. He is the silent half, the writer, the man who looks like a villain and behaves like a craftsman. Russell Mael is the falsetto, the front man, the brother who performs everything Ron will not say out loud. The interviews catch the gap between them and never close it. Beck shows up as a fan, not an expert, and that choice tells you the film respects enthusiasm over authority.
Wright writes and directs this as a completist. He marches through every studio album in order and refuses to skip the failures. The technical move that holds it together is the animation. Wright cuts between archival footage, talking heads, stop-motion, and cardboard cutouts, and the constant shift in format keeps a chronological slog feeling restless. The editing treats the band’s reinventions as a rhythm rather than a list.
This is a fan’s argument made with a fan’s stamina. Wright wants you to leave knowing the whole catalog, not just the hits, because there are no hits. The film mistakes nothing for trivia and everything for evidence. It is a portrait of two men who built a career out of being too strange to win and too stubborn to quit.