Ebony & Ivory: Jim Hosking stages an intervention against easy-bake biopics with an absurd pop-icon fantasy

It would seem that every generation gets the ‘Ebony and Ivory’ parody that it deserves. In 1982 – the same year that Paul McCartney and Stevie Wonder released their saccharinely anti-racist mega-hit – Saturday Night Live spoofed the song by casting Eddie Murphy as Little Stevie and swapping out Macca for Joe Piscopo’s Frank Sinatra. 

The results skewered the chart-topping track’s didactic keyboard metaphors (“Hold it Stevie… something tells me this is more than a song about playing the piano”) as well as the air of wet-eyed pop-celebrity grandstanding that went on to become a cliché of the mid-80s, with ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas?’ and ‘We Are the World’ just a few short years away. More recently, South Park unleashed ‘Black Puppy, White Puppy’, a canine-themed ode to tolerance penned by Stan’s dad Randy Marsh, who follows his own path of good intentions all the way to a plagiarism suit by an apoplectic Sir Paul.

Exhibit C, and arguably best in show: Jim Hosking’s Ebony & Ivory, a wacky two-hander set entirely on a remote UK island, a windswept fortress of solitude for Sky Elobar’s moody, weirdly menacing incarnation of McCartney, who’s slightly bewildered when Wonder (Gil Gex) arrives unannounced in a rowing boat for an extended, live-in summit/jam session. At this point, form dictates that I point out that Wonder was not actually present for the writing of ‘Ebony and Ivory’, which McCartney whipped up while working on material for Wings, and also that the writer of hits including ‘I Just Called to Say I Love You’ never rowed the Atlantic ocean solo. 

The lack of music-historical verisimilitude in Ebony & Ivory is not a bug, but a feature, and, moreover a point of pride; one way to look at Hosking’s film is as a sardonic – and yet, on its own absurdist terms, perfectly sincere and even sweet-hearted – intervention against easy-bake pop-biopics. But where an ace parody like Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story (2007) delights in restaging and exaggerating the tropes of its chosen subgenre, Hosking elides them entirely: the anxious tone, staccato pacing and underlying existential malaise of the whole thing is closer to Waiting for Godot than Walk the Line (2005).

Beckett, of course, is a high bar, and Ebony & Ivory isn’t really trying to measure up; on the contrary, the script makes a running joke – or maybe a fetish – of keeping the dramatic and intellectual stakes low. The closest that Gex’s Wonder comes to explaining his presence at Paul’s ‘Scottish Cottage’ is his growlingly tautological claim that “musical legends are supposed to help other musical legends, musically”; he spends considerably more time repeating profanities, always in the same precise, incantatory cadence (“shit fuck shit”) and masticating both microwave vegetarian meals and the phrase “Scottish Cottage” like he’s trying to swallow the vowels. 

As for McCartney, he oscillates wildly between being a gracious host and a sweater-clad tormentor, as when he proposes that he and Steve share something from his private stash that rhymes with “oobie-woobies”. This ostensible peace offering prompts a guessing game about the missing consonant at the start of the second word that takes up what feels like five agonising, hilarious minutes of screentime, though it’s probably less: a miniaturised, anti-comedy endurance test, an Abbott and Costello routine from hell.

There are far less noble aims for a filmmaker than making something that only really clicks under the influence of (d)oobie-woobies – plenty of them, in fact. Hosking has the courage of his convictions (such as they are) and so do his actors. Elobar previously incarnated the son of the cannibalistic title character of Hosking’s impressively tasteless serial-killer pastiche The Greasy Strangler (2016); he has one of the great, malleable screen faces, which makes his inability – or, more accurately, refusal – to look (as well as sound) anything like the most famous living British musician all the funnier. Gex isn’t much more convincing as Wonder, a high compliment given the relative, head-swivelling simplicity of that particular impersonation. 

The almost samurai-like discipline of these performances, compounded by the film’s gruelling, dead-air aesthetic, gives them a non-mimetic grandeur. There’s no chance in hell of a Timothy Chalamet-style Oscar nomination for either man here, and more power to them. There’s also no chance in hell (or only a very slim, malnourished one) that Ebony & Ivory will break midnight-movie containment to be seen by viewers who aren’t already to some extent in on the joke. Still, I’d pay anything to have a projectionist run Hosking’s film for a sold-out multiplex audience in April 2028 in place of Sam Mendes’ incoming and deluxe McCartney tribute. I can hear the audience members whispering nervously among themselves now: “That Paul Mescal has really let himself go.”

► Ebony & Ivory is in UK cinemas 19 September.