Ebony and Ivory might be the most ridiculous movie I have seen this year, and I say that with a dopey smile. It takes the famous duet from Paul McCartney and Stevie Wonder which was meant as a hopeful anthem about racial harmony and throws it into a completely different universe. It is not a music biopic. It is not a behind the scenes account of how the song was written. It is not a portrait of two towering artists. It is a shambling hangout comedy about two guys who act like fools, get stoned, and lob insults while living off veggie dinners. Somehow that feels honest. And more fun than I expected.
The way writer and director Jim Hosking frames the whole thing tells you everything from the first minute. The movie opens on a beach on the Mull of Kintyre in Scotland around the early eighties. Paul stands with his mouth open, gazing at the water, looking like he might be waiting for revelation. Instead, a small boat lurches through rough waves and grinds into the sand. Out steps Stevie wearing a white leopard print fur coat that is completely wrong for the place and perfect for the movie. He drags several maroon suitcases onto the beach, says little, and trudges with Paul up to a car with a license plate that reads NUGG3TS. Right there the tone settles in. You are either in or you are out.
From that moment forward the question of why Stevie is there never really matters. Is he invited or did he simply create his own invitation. At one point he says he is there to help Paul cement his musical legend. He says it like a dare. Whether that is true is beside the point. The film looks at these men not as icons of culture but as two overconfident goofs who believe in their own myths. You need a pinch of arrogance to think a tidy pop single could serve as a map to social harmony. The song was catchy. People hummed it. It was also very sugary. The movie gets this and then takes it a step further. It does not wag a finger or make a speech. It reveals the silliness of the whole idea by doubling down on silliness until there is nowhere to hide.
The script will make you feel like it is held together by tape and a prayer. That is part of the joke. Hosking is too smart to ask his actors to do straight impressions of McCartney and Wonder, which would turn the film into a weak sketch show. Sky Elobar plays Paul as if Paul is playing Paul. There is a light lilt to the voice that comes and goes, and he keeps referring to himself as the cute one, the one the girls go mad for. Sometimes he looks at the camera with the calm gaze of a man who believes nothing bad can happen to him. There were moments when I thought of those old rumors about Paul being dead and replaced. The performance leans into that eerie feeling. You can almost see a mask slip when Stevie gets under his skin.
Gil Gex as Stevie, meanwhile, does not try to approximate the real Stevie Wonder at all. That is a relief. Instead he creates a grumbling gremlin of a man. He growls and barks and mutters like Frank Kelly’s Father Jack from Father Ted. It is outrageous and then it is funny, and then it loops around to outrageous again. He spits the words Scottish cottage with such disdain that you can feel the walls of Pauls little rural paradise shrink. He says the phrase again and again as if he is swatting away a sentimental postcard. If Elobar brings a slightly melted wax figure of Paul, Gex is the bulldog that sneers at it.
Almost nothing happens in a traditional plot sense. There is no quest, no end goal, no montage that leads to triumph. There are scenes. A lot of scenes. Paul talks up Linda’s ready made veggie food line which he calls By the Wife with the kind of chipper pride that only gets more annoying the longer it goes on. Stevie sits in a chair like a lazy emperor and demands veggie nuggets. But he will only eat them if they are dropped into his mouth from a small ramp. This goes on longer than you would think. And then longer than that. The rhythm of the jokes is brazen, weirdly patient, and sometimes childish. That is the point.
Another stretch has Paul trying to entice Stevie with a smoke. He turns it into a guessing game that should not be funny but just is. He wants Stevie to say doobie woobie. He wants him to guess it like it is a secret spell. You can hear Paul giggle at the sound of the words. You can see Stevie fighting the urge to play along and then giving in. There are other detours. The two go swimming in the sea, which the camera records without a hint of shyness. Yes they go all out. It is juvenile. It is also very on brand for a film that keeps pecking at the idea of dignity until it falls over.
If you are waiting for big musical numbers you will be waiting a long time. Hosking uses music carefully and sparsely. There is a point where we get the famous title song and you would think the movie might turn reverent for a second. It does not. The performance is delivered with the most juvenile tone possible. It is like the movie is sticking out its tongue. The film willfully refuses to scratch that basic itch for a jukebox experience. It heads in the opposite direction. Every time it could do the expected thing it chooses to skitter into a ditch and roll around in it for a bit. Some viewers are going to bail. Some will get giddy.
There is a confidence to the way the movie ignores the shadow of the real McCartney and the real Wonder. Biographical details show up in warped form. They are like stickers on a suitcase. They suggest a place but do not transport you anywhere. The script is threadbare because any extra stitching would make it formal and respectable and that is the enemy here. This is a stoner comedy with strange limbs. It totters. It trips. It gets back up giggling and stares at the sky. The visual language follows the behavior. Colors wobble. Edits linger a beat too long or snap out early. Some scenes move with a queasy sway that mimics being a little too high. It is deliberately messy in a way that feels exact.
The attitude toward the original song is clever in a sly way. The film does not deliver a lecture about simplification or social metaphors. Instead it shows two men convincing themselves that big ideas can be poured into a neat little glass, and how silly that looks from the outside. The comedy takes lofty intentions and mixes them with the lowest gags. A ramp for nuggets. A rhyme about a joint. A repeated chant of Scottish cottage that drains the phrase of its charm and then refills it with contempt. The movie gets laughs by refusing to separate taste from vulgarity. It marries the two. That is the needle and it stings.
Elobar and Gex deserve credit for making all of this play. Their chemistry is rude and tense and alive. They are adversaries who somehow pass the time together because no one else will tolerate them. When Paul brags about being the cute one it reads as the mask of a person who is terrified of being ordinary. When Stevie mocks him with that growl it has the power of a schoolyard taunt that will not quit. The two of them become a small ecosystem of petty power struggles. Who will push who off balance. Who will get the last jab. Who will cause the next dumb idea that turns this cottage into a carnival.
There are images that stick in my mind. The boat scraping into that beach and the ridiculous coat filling the frame. The path up from the sand to the waiting car, the NUGG3TS plate glinting like a dare. The ramp aimed at a waiting mouth. A bowl of nuggets as ritual offering. Paul beaming with the pride of a person who has discovered his favorite new toy. Stevie yawning at it and then demanding more. The swim in the pale water. The gasp when the cold hits. The relief when they pop back up with the idiotic courage of two boys who know they will never get caught. The movie has a gift for making the silly feel oddly solemn. And then it quickly undercuts that feeling so you do not mistake it for poetry.
You can feel Hosking grinning in the margins. He delights in not giving people what they think they came for. A respectful story about the power of music. A glowing account of how two geniuses worked together. A celebration of art saving the day. That is not this. He gives you two men who are trapped by their own junk food tastes and their own soft egos. He pokes at the helium balloon of pop myth and lets the air out in slow comedic wheezes. It is a prank. It is also a statement about how we love to smooth over complexity with a simple chorus. And the film will not indulge that habit.
That said, it will not be everyone’s flavor. The film pushes a specific button over and over. The humor is either your thing or it is not. The conversational drift and the deliberate refusal to build toward revelation will test patience. The images sometimes drift into dreamy or trippy territory. Faces warp a bit. Voices echo. A shot holds long enough to feel like an accident. If that rubs you raw, you might bail before the second act catches you. This is a vibe movie. You surrender to the vibration or you do not. The movie does not negotiate.
I kept laughing. Sometimes against my better judgment. Sometimes because the film cornered me with a stupid joke and then would not let go. The best moments sneak past your defenses because the film seems too slight to mount an argument. Then it does. There is a line between nice and naive, between sincere art and sentimental gloss. Ebony and Ivory bounces on that line until it snaps. It stares directly at the urge to turn a complicated social dream into a cuddly singalong and then turns its back to the camera and moonwalks into the sea. You can call that mean or immature. You could also call it honest.
What surprised me most is how affectionate the movie feels even as it mocks. It does not hate these two men. It sees them. It sees their soft bellies and their silly pride and the ways they hide inside it. It recognizes how a famous person can get used to easy answers and easy meals and easy praise. The film pokes that cushion, then another, and then piles on until the couch collapses. But it never feels joyless. It feels giddy. The way friends can roast each other because they know the exact size of the bruise.
The last stretch holds to the tone. There is no fake epiphany. No final montage of studio success. No dramatic reconciliation. What you get is a juvenile performance of a famous tune that is designed to irritate and thrill. The joke is not subtle. The choice is. The movie could have punched down or wagged its finger. Instead it sticks to its low comic register and shows that sometimes the purest critique of empty grand gestures is to meet them at their level and make them look silly. High and low are not enemies here. They are partners in crime.
I do not think Ebony and Ivory will win converts who demand conventional structure or musical celebration. That is fine. For everyone else who enjoys a comedy that leans into nonsense to get at a truth, this is pure. It is not polite. It does not clean up after itself. It is a gleeful mess that knows exactly why it is messy. And in the company of Paul and Stevie as this film imagines them, you might find yourself grinning and wincing at the same time. I did. I also kept thinking about the way pop music can inflate our sense of what is possible and how a joke can be a pin that brings it back to earth.
So no this is not a song about harmony come to life. It is a prank about belief and self regard and the slippery comfort of a catchy chorus. It is a hangout comedy that refuses to hang onto anything respectable. It is two men with big reputations acting like idiots and daring you to call them on it. And it is strange and bold and very funny in a way that feels precise the longer you sit with it. That mixture of needling and laughter is what makes Ebene and Ivory, the film, a little bit of art, even when it pretends to be too dumb to know any better.
One last thought. There is a reason the beach is white and the coat is animal print and the suitcases are maroon. There is a reason the car announces its affection for nuggets. The movie lays out simple colors like a child with too many crayons and then smears them until you can not tell what the original drawing was. In that mess, the movie finds a true picture of two men who wanted to write an anthem. It gives us something sillier and, weirdly, something sharper. It finally asks a plain question without asking it out loud. What if the big idea looked foolish the second it stepped into the light. And what if that was the only way to see it clearly.
