Pick Rental: "The Sparks Brothers"

Edgar Wright's delightful recap of a cult band's 50-year career

A quick heads up that the exuberantly funny Edgar Wright music documentary “The Spark Brothers” is coming off Premium Video On Demand (for $19.99) and is now available on all the major streaming platforms (except Netflix, as usual) for $5.99 a pop, a much better bargain even if you’ve never heard of Sparks.

I’d heard of Sparks for decades – the rock group fronted by/consisting of California-born brothers Ron and Russel Mael has been releasing records since 1971 – but I’d always passed them by, never quite sure whether they were for real or an elaborate joke. That turns out to have been a mistake, because after I first saw “The Sparks Brothers” back in June, I couldn’t scrub 50 years of songs out of my head. (Here’s a handy Spotify primer for beginners.)

The group was always bigger across the Atlantic (“the best British band ever to come from America” someone calls them here) and after they switched in the late 1970s from arch, eccentric art-pop (an influence on Queen, among other things) to a coolly discombobulated club sound, they laid the groundwork for any number of New Romantics and post-punkers, all of whom line up before Wright’s camera to bow low in we’re-not-worthy appreciation.

Even if you don’t know the music – even if you don’t like it –  “The Sparks Brothers” is worth the rental for the Maels themselves. The brothers were always an intriguing visual mismatch, with Russell blow-dried and handsome in the Roger Daltrey/Robert Plant mode and Ron an exclamation mark of pure weirdness, playing keyboards and side-eying the audience in a crisp white shirt and tie. (And a Hitler moustache, never commented upon.) In Wright’s film, they’re a deadpan riot, taking the director’s questions as they come and playing with the structure of the entire bio-doc format. (They wrote the movie’s opening fanfare, titled “Documentary Film Fanfare.”) At the same time, we witness a commitment to songwriting and performing that is intensely dedicated and, although the Maels may be loath to admit it, entirely serious. After a half century of these guys, it’s time to acknowledge that, yes, they’re for real.