The Sparks Brothers
**Seen at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival.
When feature filmmakers make the move to directing documentaries, it’s a good bet that a piece of their cinematic DNA is going to come with them. So it should not be surprising that for his first foray into documentaries, Edgar Wright has made a film that feels like…an Edgar Wright film. All of his narratives have a love-love relationship with music, so it should not be surprising that Wright has made a musical documentary. His subject is one of the most unique bands of all-time, Sparks, which I only know from one of the most bat-crap crazy dance sequences of all-time in Hal Needham’s “Rad”- I’m not going to lie, seeing Wright get Jason Schwartzman to admit, on camera, that his mother (Talia Shire) was in that movie was a highlight for me in watching this.
Documentaries are dependent both on the subject, and the filmmaker’s handling of the subject, for their pacing and ability to hold our interest. If you’ve watched the Three Flavors trilogy or “Scott Pilgrim vs. the World” or “Baby Driver,” you know Wright’s abilities as a director; it helps that he is also a massive Sparks fan (he even shows up in the documentary as “fanboy”). The men who make up Sparks, brothers Russell and Ron Mael, are the other part of the equation, and they are fascinating people to watch discuss their lives and career, and not just because of their distinct look. Through 135 entertaining, intoxicating minutes, Wright, the Mael brothers, and fans and collaborators tell the five decade story of Sparks, which started under the name Halfnelson as a band made up of college kids experimenting, and has continued to up to the present day, with an album just coming out in 2020, and a movie collaboration on the way.
Sparks is probably the most fascinating case study in a band able to sustain a career over decades that you’ll ever see. Most bands, like the Rolling Stones or the Grateful Dead or Bruce Springsteen or Bob Dylan, have done it by just playing the hits for years, while not really deviating away from what their fans want. What makes Sparks unique is not only how, like Bowie, they’ve been able to reinvent their sound over the years, but that they’ve never really reached the levels of popularity of those bands, even if they’re as influential as any of them are. There are so many peaks and valleys in Sparks’s career that you almost lose count by the 2000s, and it feeds into their mystique as a musical oddity, but also makes the fact that they’re endured all the more impressive. I have to imagine that’s part of why Wright has gravitated to them over the years, and why he wanted to tell their story. Well that, and the fact that their music is pretty damn great to listen to, as well. Sparks is a one-of-a-kind band, and “The Sparks Brothers”- which uses black-and-white interview segments, archival footage, and animation to tell this story- is something special to take in, and appreciate.
