Ebony & Ivory is the story of a 1981 meeting between Paul McCartney (Sky Elobar) and Stevie Wonder (Gil Gex) on the Mull of Kintyre in Scotland to work on a new song.
The thing is, neither Elobar nor Gex look or act anything like their real-life counterparts. Both are horrible singers. Their tale doesn’t resemble any aspect of the famous duo’s real-life encounter. And, presumably because of rights issues, their full names are never uttered, and their signature collaboration “Ebony and Ivory,” which gives the film its title, is never heard. There isn’t even a piano in sight—although there are sheep, fried foods, and multiple penises bouncing and flopping in the wind.
Bearing no relationship to reality, The Greasy Strangler director Jim Hosking’s film, in theaters Aug. 8, is surrealist absurdity of the highest (or is that lowest?) order, a comedy that’s so unabashedly out there that it practically dares audiences to reject it.
A through-the-looking-glass fantasy about two quirky egomaniacs evolving from enemies to friends—and, per their #1 smash, learning to live together “in perfect harmony”—this belligerently bonkers whatsit feels like a warped acid-trip episode of VH1’s Behind the Music in which facts are irrelevant and truth is illusory.
It’s hard to tell if it’s the best or worst movie of the year, largely because it’s so wantonly weird that it erases the distinction between the two.
Wearing a jacket, sweater, boots and an ascot around his neck, Paul stands on a gray, empty beach and watches as Stevie row, row, rows his boat to shore, after which he gathers his three suitcases and follows Paul up a hill to his home. In a long fur coat and dark sunglasses, Stevie doesn’t behave as if he’s blind, but later shots will reveal his milky white eyes.
Nonetheless, they’re not his sole striking feature, as the curly-haired Stevie is also notable for his perpetual growling as well as his habit of reiterating, in stilted fashion, things that both he and Paul have just said. Upon entering the abode, Paul welcomes his guest to his “Scottish Cottage”—a term pronounced in a goofy, guttural local accent. In return, Stevie remarks about Paul’s homemade tea, “Smell like pee-pee, taste like pee-ee.”
This sparks the first of many brief quarrels that quickly give way to additional lunacy. Paul and Stevie retreat to the dinner table for “the munchy-munch,” which in this case proves to be some of the frozen vegetarian meals that Paul’s wife is hawking. Paul admits, “I’m a proper veggie, mate,” and Stevie replies, “I’m a sometimes-a-tarian” who “eat-a the sausage.”
They enjoy some beers and then Stevie takes a bath that’s so hot, he lets loose with his signature curse: “S--t and f---. S--t-and-f---!” Once warmed, he joins Paul for a whiskey and “a little tug of a doobie. And a little tug of a woobie while we’re at it.” This instigates a lengthy conversation in which Paul attempts to get Stevie to relax with “DW”—initials that Stevie can’t decipher, even after Paul gives him clues such as, “His second name is woobie” and “his first name rhymes with the second name.”
This makes less than no sense, and Hosking never wavers in his commitment to his bats--t bit. Line to line and scene to scene, Ebony & Ivory aggressively stymies expectations, and though that often renders it little more than a feature-length gag, it’s an inspired one that constantly grows stranger and sillier.
Upon getting high (“Weave your magic spell, Satan!” pronounces Stevie), the two talk vegetarian-diet constipation and Paul croons an original a cappella ditty about his wife’s non-meat cuisine (“Hey guys, don’t forget the vegetarian schnitzels…”). When they seemingly run out of nuggets, Stevie is aghast—until, that is, Paul pleases his compatriot by busting out a “nugget slide” which he places on the dining table so he can roll the last nugget into Stevie’s mouth.
What follows in Ebony & Ivory is just as incoherent. Stevie explains that he’s visiting because he wants to help Paul become a musical legend. (“Musical legends help each other to make music as only musical legends can make when musical legends decide to make music together as only musical legends can do.”) Paul responds that, “It’s me. Look at me. The cute one. The one the girls go mad for.”
He slanders Stevie’s music as so cheesy, “If your music was a pizza, you can forget about it being a four-cheese pizza. It would be at least a five-cheese pizza. In fact, you can forget that. It’s not even a six-cheese pizza. Or even a seven-cheese pizza. We’d be well into double figures as we watched you make the world’s first twelve-cheese pizza.”
They try to strangle each other. Stevie has a hallucinatory dream about his parents in which he’s both his mom and dad, who keep creepily telling him, “You are not alone.” Later the musicians go skinny dipping in the sea, resulting in prolonged shots of Elobar and Gex’s members and, ultimately, the most hilariously awkward and idiotic attempt at CPR ever committed to film.
Hosking scores his action to bouncy synths, drums, and bass, and he shoots his material in uncomfortable close-ups and extended takes that allow his madness to unfurl in discomfiting real time.
Awash in recurring phrases and actions (such as Paul making a thumbs up that’s accompanied by gross round-mouthed squishy noises), Ebony & Ivory is akin to a series of performance-art memes, and it becomes more hypnotic as it unspools in unexpected directions, whether it’s Stevie’s hunger for nourishing hot chocolate or the pair’s run-ins with livestock. By the time Paul and Stevie are prancing around in mist, making faces at a giant singing toad, the film has long since entered an alternate dimension of simultaneously exhausting and exhilarating outlandishness.
Ebony & Ivory is a niche offering with a genuinely avant-garde spirit, and if that limits its appeal (and it will!), adventurous moviegoers will find it to be a unique descent into a bizarro world of eccentric catchphrases and demented flights of fancy. No matter what the next five months bring, you won’t see a crazier 2025 film.
