A confounding exercise in celebration of the absurd, “Ebony & Ivory” is confident and knows what it wants to be…even if almost no one else does. The kind of movie that is probably a hoot in a packed theater full of blackout drunk festival goers on their fourth screening of the day, it doesn’t translate well outside of that venue…or any kind of sober setting where viewers have to actually pay attention/process this thing.  

“Ebony & Ivory” opens with Stevie Wonder (Gil Gex) arriving alone in a rowboat on the Mull of Kintyre, Scotland, sometime in 1981, where Paul McCartney (Sky Elobar) awaits him on the beach. The pair settles in Paul’s remote cabin, where the conversation turns towards travel, tea, whisky, and even “doobie-woobies.” Outside of a throwaway line where Stevie refers to the two of them as “great big musical legends,” the story and the characters in it enjoy no introduction or context.

Instead, writer/director Jim Hosking relies on the audience to understand who these two men are, and why they speak to each other with all the diction, coherence, and maturity of nine-year-olds. Eschewing any traditional three-act structure that introduces characters and conflict, “Ebony & Ivory” is instead like some kind of low-rpm motorboat with its rudder stuck hard over to one side. Bubbling and gurgling with no real purpose in an endless circle of “comedy,” its bits are rooted in the repetition of silly words strung together against smash-cuts of screamed profanity.

Ostensibly a send-up of an all-too-real and hollow pop song that Hoskinggiddilyblasphemes with an equally absurd revisionist farce, nothing in the movie’s torturous 85-minute runtime works: from idea to iteration. “Ebony & Ivory” flows from the concept that the audience understands who Paul and Stevie are in the broader pop culture sense, both in their prime and in this kind of stalled early-80s period. It also assumes that viewers are familiar with the duet ballad that the real pair released in 1982, and the saccharine, post-racial fantasy world it presented “in perfect harmony.”

These are important, foundational pillars of the story that get no explanation (the song never plays, either), robbing the already wafer-thin comedy bits of any heft for the uninitiated. And as for these attempts at humorous interplay, they land with all the grace and agility of a sack of hammers. There’s an undercurrent of winking satire rooted in broad, known quantities like the fact that Paul McCartney doesn’t eat meat, yet the story and the joke setups never approach anything resembling a clever or rewarding punchline.

What’s left is a series of interactions in and around Paul’s cabin that feel like they were scripted by someone with a traumatic brain injury. Elobar doesn’t make any consistent effort to maintain his accent any more than Gex tries to uphold the pretense of his blindness, which is about as close as Hosking comes to landing a joke in this thing. Indeed, the whole effort feels like one long riff on the absurdity of its fake history premise, which again, has no anchor in any narrative work presented on-screen.

Paul and Stevie spend the majority of their time having inane, pointless conversations about vegetarian cooking and food delivery systems, and don’t collaborate on the song at the center of all of this. And while there is nothing wrong with that since the real-life Paul penned “Ebony and Ivory” independent of Stevie (only recording it with him later), the fact that the pair never worked on the song despite that being the stated premise of the movie is…odd. It all feels like a production that lost its script on the first day and just winged it…on a steady diet of LSD and mushrooms.

A brutal slog that eschews even the so-bad-it’s-good classification, “Ebony & Ivory” is an excruciating exercise in finding the barrel’s bottom. Watching this, one understands that there are more notable examples of bad acting, humorless writing, jagged pacing, and nonsensical conceits than what’s on display here, but it’s hard to bring any of them to mind. This film is like some kind of corrupted, infectious, cinematic black hole that obscures and swallows all other sins in and around it. Artistically irredeemable and impossible to recommend on any basis whatsoever, about the only thing “Ebony & Ivory” succeeds at is matching the artistic value of the eponymous song: a dubious distinction if ever there was one. [F]