“Ebony & Ivory” is a deeply unpleasant movie. Grating, juvenile and repetitive, this eccentric stoner farce written and directed by Jim Hosking feels at times more like an experiment in social conditioning than a comedy — like one of those Stanley Milgram exercises designed to study the limits of human behavior, as if Hosking wanted to test how much suffering an audience could endure.
Hosking, whose breakout film “The Greasy Strangler” sustains a similar if marginally less abrasive tone, has a distinctive style. His main comic strategy is to write an absurd line of dialogue — something alliterative and nonsensical but unfunny, the cruder the better — and to have his actors repeat it over and over, sometimes more than a dozen times. Does the phrase “Scottish cottage” amuse you? Well, what if I wrote “Scottish cottage” again?
This is, loosely speaking, a music biopic: Sky Elobar and Gil Gex play thinly veiled caricatures of Paul McCartney and Stevie Wonder, meeting to collaborate on their hit duet that shares the film’s name. Mainly they eat vegetarian food, bicker and prance around nude, showing off prosthetic genitals, in case that sounds like a laugh riot. It could be called a parody, but of what? It bears no resemblance to the biopic form.
Anti-comedy is often tedious and is difficult to sustain — even the strongest films in this mode, like the delightful “Tim and Eric’s Billion Dollar Movie,” are a tough sit. “Ebony & Ivory,” in its unrelenting aggression, is particularly exhausting, though I suppose you have to admire the integrity of its vision. Irritating as Hosking’s humor is, you can’t deny his commitment to the bit.
Ebony & Ivory
Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 28 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on most major platforms.
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