EBONY & IVORY - Mark Reviews Movies

Ebony & Ivory, Drafthouse Films

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Review by Mark Dujsik | August 7, 2025

Paul McCartney's "Ebony and Ivory," which he sang as a duet with Stevie Wonder, is a well-meaning but disastrously cheesy song, comparing racial harmony to the two colors of keys on a piano. Writer/director Jim Hosking's Ebony & Ivory doesn't mean well and often feels like a complete comedic disaster.

The filmmaker clearly doesn't think much of the song or, apparently, the two musical icons who recorded it. There's nothing wrong with those opinions, but if one is going to comically take down something or someone, it usually helps for the comedy to resemble some kind of actual joke.

Any joke would have sufficed here, in fact. Some context could have helped, too, but once Paul (Sky Elobar) and Stevie (Gil Gex)—whose names might never be spoken in the movie, actually—spend somewhere between five and ten minutes in the nude, there's only one context about which Hosking seems to care. If it doesn't make sense, that's for the better.

One could probably spend a good amount of time theorizing which mind-altering substances and how much of them might make this movie coherent or amusing. To be fair, the story, such as it isn't, is very simple to describe. Stevie shows up at Paul's farm in Scotland, after apparently rowing a boat across the Atlantic Ocean, and after speaking random nonsense and getting irritated with each other and eating a lot of breaded vegetarian foodstuffs, do those same things over and over and over again. The sequence of the pair cavorting and dancing naked, with sizeable and obvious prosthetics hanging between their legs, is almost a welcome relief, because it's different from the established and insufferable pattern, at least.

Speaking of patterns, that's pretty much the extent of the dialogue, too—just words and phrases repeated between the two characters within each scene and across several of them. Hosking tries to get a lot of mileage out of Stevie saying the phrase "Scottish cottage," and to be fair, Gex's faux Scottish brogue is kind of amusing the first three or four times he breaks out those two words. There are times when the actor sounds more British than his co-star, actually, since Elobar only suggests a Mancunian dialect by occasionally saying his lines in a sing-song manner. That's probably part of Hosking's joke, but how could anyone tell?

The scenes amount to the two men sitting in rooms, while repeating the same ideas or exact words. Stevie will randomly swear when he finds something especially egregious, and Paul occasionally stick up his thumb and makes a wet sound with mouth as his head bobs back and forth. The single funny moment might be when Stevie, who is blind but only when Hosking needs the character to be, mentions that he knows exactly gesture Paul is making. Other people have talked about it, after all, and the funny bit is the silence when Paul asks if those people are saying good things about the move. Maybe it's just relief to have some quiet for once in a movie in which every sound, especially the blaring electronic score, is annoying to some degree.

The music repeats. The talking repeats. A dream in which Stevie imagines his parents, who look exactly like him, talking to him repeats the same lines in repeating alternative patterns. The two men start baaing like the village's single sheep repeatedly, before turning into sheep themselves, when they repeat each other lifting their tails and urinating.

Paul repeatedly makes his houseguest hot chocolate and explains the recipe, because Stevie repeatedly asks for it with that exact recipe. One scene makes one want to never hear the word "nugget" again, although the slide Paul has on hand just for the purpose of putting the last vegetable bite into Stevie's mouth is too weird not to get a chuckle.

The movie is more an endurance test than anything, and maybe, that's actually Hosking's approach to the humor—to just hit us with things until we relent to whatever madness this is. Then again, suggesting some sort of method to Ebony & Ivory might be giving it way too much credit. It tries too hard to earn laughs with the bare minimum of joke setup, and the experience of it is trying and borderline painful.

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