102 TIME July 19/July 26, 2021
TimeOff Reviews
MOVIES
Three music docs for
a new summer of love
By Stephanie Zacharek
I
N AHMIR “QUESTLOVE” THOMP-
son’s radiant documentary Sum-
mer of Soul, an account of a star-
studded concert series that took
place in a Harlem park during the sum-
mer of Woodstock but received far less
attention, a 50ish gentleman who at-
tended the shows as a kid, Musa Jackson,
describes the experience as if it were a
dream. Only when he saw footage of the
performances, stored away for some 50
years, did he realize how overwhelming
this event—a showcase of great Black
performers, staged for a nearly all-Black
audience—had been. “You put memo-
ries away,” he says, “and sometimes you
don’t even know if they’re real.”
If part of a musician’s skill is know-
ing just where to put which notes, the
other, more elusive gift is knowing how
to spin a dream between performer and
listener. This summer, as musicians and
audiences alike reacquaint themselves
with the pleasures of live music, three
documentaries help connect us not just
with what it means to be an artist, but
also with the equally crucial act of being
a listener, of becoming part of the crack-
ling circuit between artist and audience.
To be a fan is to be part of a community,
and Questlove’s Summer of Soul, Edgar
Wright’s The Sparks Brothers and the
Hulu docuseries McCartney 3,2,1 remind
us of the ways music unites us, whether
we’re nestled shoulder to shoulder with
like-minded people or plugging in more
intimately via headphones or AirPods.
In the six-episode McCartney 3,2,1,
premiering July 16 , superstar re-
cord producer Rick Rubin sits
down with once-and-forever
Beatle Paul McCartney to walk
through some of the sign-
posts of his career, as
well as some songs that
simply present the op-
portunity for an amusing
anecdote or two. The series,
directed by Zachary Heinzer-
ling, is so relaxed that you al-
most forget you’re watching a
YET FANDOM, even at the level inspired
by the Beatles, is never an end in it-
self. It’s also a beginning, an open door
to rapture, to fi nding your place in the
world—and, sometimes, to creating new
work that builds on the old. Filmmaker
Edgar Wright (Shaun of the Dead, Baby
Driver) has long adored the art-pop act
known as Sparks, and The Sparks Broth-
ers, now in theaters, covers the duo’s
50-plus-year career in voluminous, af-
fectionate detail.
Brothers Ron and Russell Mael are
the performers behind Sparks: born and
raised in Los Angeles, they started their
fi rst band there in 1968, though their
career didn’t ignite until they decamped
for London. Circa 1974, the time of
the duo’s fi rst big U.K. hit, “This Town
Ain’t Big Enough for Both of Us,” Rus-
sell was a string-bean glam rocker with
a curly mop of hair, a teenybopper idol
spinning out semisurrealist lyrics. Ron,
glowering behind the keyboard, favored
a narrow smudge of a mustache that’s
either Hitlerian or Chaplin esque, de-
pending on your mood.
Although this sounds like an un-
likely formula for success, Sparks has
endured. The Mael brothers continue
to make and release strange, innovative
albums, and they’ve written a movie,
Annette, directed by Leos Carax, which
was chosen as this year’s opening fi lm at
Cannes. And while their brand of avant-
garde weirdness has attracted loyal fans
over the years, their infl uence may be
best measured by the number of musi-
cians and bands they’ve inspired. The
movie’s trailer touts Sparks as “your fa-
vorite band’s favorite band,” and sure
enough, one artist after another shows
up in The Sparks Brothers—Beck,
Thurston Moore, Flea—to pay hom-
age. Over the years, clueless critics
have at times accused Sparks
of stealing musical styles they
in fact originated. They were
so ahead of their time that
they were practically ahead of
themselves.
Artists reach us by surprising us,
even if that just means telling us old
stories in new ways. But Summer
of Soul, now in theaters and stream-
ing on Hulu, shows us another side of
that equation: the way an audience’s
mere presence—its energy and love,In Summer of Soul, members of the
5th Dimension take fl ight, with fringe,
at 1969’s Harlem Cultural Festival
▽veritable rock-’n’-roll god in action. One
minute he’s sitting at the piano, playing
a trio of chords that can be mixed and
matched into a nearly infi nite garden of
delights; the next he’s revealing the se-
crets of an isolated vocal track laid down
practically a lifetime ago.
I know what you may be thinking:
Who needs more Beatles stuff? Even
people who love the Beatles don’t al-
ways love people who love the Beatles,
as anyone who’s gone on a fi rst (and
last) date with an obsessive Fab Four
mansplainer can attest.
But the intimacy of McCartney 3,2,1
makes it hard not to feel some tender-
ness for this megastar, now 79, whose
band shook something loose in the
world. To hear McCartney refl ect on the
early days is to be reminded that he and
his bandmates started out as kids, hon-
ing their chops by playing live shows in
humble venues. They didn’t even have
a tape recorder to help them work out
their ideas. “We were writing songs
that were memorable not because we
wanted them to be remembered,” Mc-
Cartney tells Rubin, “but because we
had to remember them. A very practical
reason, really.”