You Thought the Song Was Rubbish?
Among Paul McCartney’s high-profile musical collaborations in the 1980s, “Ebony and Ivory” is considered by many the worst. But its three minutes and 45 seconds pale in comparison to the excruciating 86 it takes to watch Jim Hosking’s 2025 film of the same name.
From the writer-director of the cult horror film “The Greasy Strangler,” “Ebony and Ivory” parodies the events that led to the legendary 1982 team-up between McCartney and Stevie Wonder. Yet even by the loose standards of cultural satire or even looser, of outsider art, this two-hander about McCartney and Wonder butting heads in a cabin on the Mull of Kintyre ahead of recording the chart-topping song is brutally unwatchable, an Adult Swim short film stretched, either via desperation or willful obliviousness, to feature length.
Sky Elobar and Gil Gex, stars of Hosking’s previous films, play the British and American artists. After Stevie (Gex) arrives by rowboat from across the Atlantic Ocean, Paul invites him into his seaside home, where the two spar verbally while dining on vegetarian meals produced by the former Beatle’s wife, who’s conveniently away for the weekend (even more conveniently for the unlucky actress whose résumé might have been stained by this stinker). After a trip to the sea, Stevie nearly drowns, leading to his request for an extremely precise order of (admittedly delicious-looking) hot chocolate that rapidly escalates into a confrontation threatening to ruin their creative partnership before it even begins.
As evidenced by films like Bao Nguyen’s “The Greatest Night in Pop,” a documentary about the recording of “We Are the World,” music mythmaking can make for fascinating entertainment, whether setting the record straight or reimagining it altogether. And it would be one thing if Hosking attempted, say, to dramatize an apocryphal conversation between McCartney and Wonder that no one had been able to verify or refute.
But based on the story told here, it would be generous to assume that Hosking’s chronicle of this often-derided moment in songwriting was meant to serve as revisionist history, much less a deconstruction of the pop iconography of these two musical luminaries. Instead, his approach feels more like a feature-length “Tim & Eric Awesome Show, Great Job” sketch than an actual narrative, and its stars are even more amateurish on screen than the actual nonprofessionals that Heidecker and Wareheim cast on their show.
No one should expect an even approximate impersonation of the shaggy McCartney and beatific Wonder, but the two of them can’t even seem to come to an agreement on whether or not Gex is meant to be blind. He and Elobar grimace, grunt and gesticulate at one another, repeating dialogue until it becomes unbearable as the audience internally pleads for something — anything — to happen. Is a handmade miniature slide built to deliver veggie nuggets into Stevie Wonder’s mouth a whimsically stupid enough idea to capture your interest? If so, this movie might be for you. For the rest of us, watching Stevie bark at his parents (also played by Gex) for several minutes after getting “the spins” from smoking a “doobie-woobie” is not likely to get the job done.
Conversely, there’s a protracted sequence in which a naked Elobar and Gex run around swinging their genitals to the sound of the film’s one bright spot, its funky, electronic score by composer Andrew Hung. But if you haven’t already begun to scream “holy hell, please do something!” by the end of Paul and Stevie’s tête-à-tête over the name of the “spins”-inducing joint they share, the eventual communion the two have with a giant amphibian and the climactic dialogue between a black sheep and white sheep that inspires their hit song will not likely redeem the journey hapless viewers have paid to embark upon.
More than ever, and especially with a panorama of distribution paths, it feels like low-budget films have an opportunity to be idiosyncratic and transgressive in their search for audiences. Selecting a real-life cultural moment as inspiration feels like a great way to marry an oddball sensibility with something at least potentially commercial. To that end, it’s admirable that Elijah Wood’s SpectreVision shingle will support projects like this that exist far outside the spectrum of conventional storytelling.
