Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Sparks Brothers’ on VOD, Edgar Wright’s Infectious Documentary About Your Favorite Band’s Favorite Band

Virtuoso director Edgar Wright shifts gears from geek-niche comedies to geek-niche documentaries with The Sparks Brothers — now on VOD — a profile of a musical unit you’ve probably never heard of, despite it being well into its fifth decade of existence. Ron and Russell Mael are Sparks, a restlessly prolific sibling duo who are probably your favorite musician’s (or actor’s or comedian’s or writer’s) favorite band: Beck, “Weird” Al Yankovic, Jason Schwartzman, Patton Oswalt, Neil Gaiman, Mike Myers, Thurston Moore and many others line up to testify to their eccentric genius. Will the film persuade you to join the cult following, and see what you’ve been missing all along? Mmmmmmaybe.

THE SPARKS BROTHERS: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: First of all, Ron and Russell kind of hate being called “the Sparks brothers.” They are brothers, yes — the former three years older than the latter — and they are the musical project Sparks, but they’re technically the Mael brothers, so it’s kind of a playful joke for Wright to title the movie as he does. Anyway, a bunch of famous people open the movie with soundbites, and Schwarzman’s is the funniest: He doesn’t want to watch the movie because he’s worried it’ll puncture the long-cultivated Sparks mystique, but he’ll do it anyway, because he’s in it. Also, everyone thinks Sparks is from England, but they’re not. The Maels are from the Los Angeles area, and still live there. They were pretty big in England for a while, and later in France and Germany, but they never caught fire in their home country, and that’s a huge deal if you’re an American with a typically egocentric view of your place in the world.

Anyway, Ron is a keyboardist and Russell is a singer, and the overarching idea of this documentary is that they were, are and always will be weirdos marching to the beat of their own drum, which is pretty much a literal statement, not a metaphorical one: They started out as a ’70s glam-type band and became a new wave band and then became a mostly dancing-about-architecture band. Wright details their biography from their upbringing — their mother was so cool, she took them to see the Beatles TWICE — to (almost) here and now, when they’re about to celebrate the release of the musical film Annette, which they wrote the screenplay and songs for, on Amazon Prime later this month. Anyway, they’ve written more than 300 songs for 25 albums, including a late-’70s synth-pop record that predates many, many bands that became much, much more famous for that style, and some of those people are here in the movie saying as much. Nothing will stop Sparks from doing what Sparks does, save for the reaper, it seems.

Wright talks to not just appreciators but key and peripheral figures in the Sparks bio — current and former members of their backing band, producers, record company guys (I’m pretty sure they’re ALL guys, and by that I mean no women) and himself, a Wright appears a couple times with the word “fanboy” beneath his name. By the time the filmmaker appears as a talking head in his own movie, “fanboy” is an obviousness on par with the sky being blue and water being wet, because the tone is one of love and awe and gratefulness that the Maels exist to grace the chosen few with their art. Anyway, Russell has always been the prettyboy singer and Ron sat stoically at his keyboard, lightly mugging in a mysterious and subtly comedic manner, often while wearing a Hitler mustache, although it’s a pencil one now. Why did he change it? Because after a while, it was a bit too sketch, I presume? That’s a question Wright maybe should’ve asked, but he didn’t.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: File The Sparks Brothers with A Band Called Death, Searching for Sugar Man, Last Days Here (hell yeah Pentagram!) and such docs that profile the world’s most grossly underappreciated musical artists.

Performance Worth Watching: Although Schwartzman is the funniest talking head here, Jane Wiedlin of the Go Go’s is the only person to dish on the Maels’ personal lives when she says she had a “very very brief” fling with Russell after she guest-starred on the minor Billboard/MTV hit “Cool Places” with Sparks in 1983.

Memorable Dialogue: Wiedlin nails Sparks’ appeal, and/or lack thereof: “They were a bit much for most people.”

Sex and Skin: Have Ron and Russell ever even had sex (with other people, of course)? Who knows!

Our Take: Don’t expect the usual Behind the Music formula with The Sparks Brothers, because as much as we learn about Ron and Russell’s personal lives, they’ve never partied or done drugs or drunk alcohol or touched a woman. They ARE heterosexual, despite having a sizable gay following — that’s made clear. But keeping us on the other side of the curtain of their lives is by design, because the Maels have always kept their private selves exactly that, surely to maintain their mystique.

We see glimpses of the inside of Russell’s house — nice enough place, modest kitchen, Ron has to park on the street, classy home studio — where the brothers convene to write and record music. But that’s it. Do they have girlfriends or children? Do they have hobbies? Do they ever quarrel or have creative differences? We may never know. Chances are, their lives are quite conventional, in great contrast to the creativity of their music — one of their ex-bandmates says, during the lowest point of their up and down and up and down and up and down and up and down and up career, that they “saved their money for a rainy day,” thus allowing them to keep writing and recording and pursuing their art. I don’t think the guys in Ratt did that.

So this is primarily a shut-up-and-talk-about-the-music doc, and Wright proceeds unerringly chronologically from the 1960s to the 2020s, stirring the visual soup by dropping some over-their-shoulders footage and amusing animated bits among the talking heads, archival segments, recent live-concert clips and stills of gig flyers revealing that Queen and the Red Hot Chili Peppers were opening acts for Sparks, not that anybody even comes close to making a big deal out of that, or even mentioning it, as if the movie’s just tossing it in the fine print and wondering if anyone will notice. Wright’s wide-eyed fanboydom and well-established keen ear for crisp soundtrack cues keeps the tone buoyant and the pace snappy, although he bets a little too heavy on the ability of the Maels’ goofball charisma to keep this 140-minute doc afloat; only the most diehard of Sparksophiles won’t be totally gassed by the two-hour mark.

For a while, the film threatens to be a subtextual research paper on the way the music industry has evolved during the last half-century, but that’s ultimately a flimsy slab of Easter ham. Wright’s disinterested in anything that isn’t the genius of Russell and Ron — the film feels like overexuberant promo material in its later moments. And besides, any analysis of the music business isn’t wholly relevant because Sparks has pretty much defied all of its conventions. Bottom line, they’re the exception to many rules, and The Sparks Brothers will convince you that the Mael brothers definitely, most definitely, deserve to have a documentary made about them.

Our Call: STREAM IT. The good news is, The Sparks Brothers is inclusive, and quite watchable even for the unenlightened. If Wright’s goal is to get more people to listen to their music, he’s likely achieving it.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com or follow him on Twitter: @johnserba.

Where to stream The Sparks Brothers