The trail­er for The Sparks Broth­ers salutes a sin­gu­lar musi­cal legacy

Tout­ed as ​“your favorite band’s favorite band,” the LA-based pop duo Sparks are in a class by them­selves. For over 50 years, they’ve amassed a cat­a­logue of albums now num­ber­ing 25, along with trail­blaz­ing videos and live per­for­mance stunts that have gone on to inspire a gen­er­a­tion of musi­cal luminaries.

This grand lega­cy will be immor­tal­ized in the new doc­u­men­tary The Sparks Broth­ers, the first trail­er for which arrived online just today. This isn’t your typ­i­cal biopic, though; mem­bers Ron and Rus­sell Mael say out­right that they were resis­tant to the talk­ing-head iner­tia of the mod­ern music doc­u­men­tary, fear­ing that it would come off as ​“dry,” cuing a buck­et of water to drench them both.

Direc­tor and life­long Sparks fan Edgar Wright brings a lev­i­ty and exper­i­men­tal­ism to the pro­ceed­ings, dab­bling in papi­er-mâché stop-motion, ani­ma­tion, and oth­er mixed-media shenani­gans to con­vey the avant-garde spir­it of the band. With com­men­tary from Jack Antonoff, Beck, Gior­gio Moroder, and many oth­ers, the film attempts to cov­er the whole of a sprawl­ing oeu­vre, along with the inim­itable per­son­al­i­ties behind it.

In his review from this year’s Sun­dance Film Fes­ti­val, our man on the scene Ed Gibbs raved, ​“A sto­ry as rich as this should inspire every odd­ball out there to go forth and cul­ti­vate.” He praised the com­pre­hen­sive cov­er­age, as the film dili­gent­ly speaks to every chap­ter of an excep­tion­al­ly lengthy career, includ­ing their upcom­ing col­lab­o­ra­tion with Leos Carax on his new fea­ture Annette.

For neo­phytes, it’s a help­ful primer on a band that can seem impen­e­tra­ble to out­siders; to hard­core fans, it’s a wor­thy trib­ute with a few new tid­bits to share. No mat­ter how broad or eso­teric one’s musi­cal tastes, every­one loves a band who mod­eled them­selves after Sparks, even if they don’t real­ize it.

The Sparks Broth­ers comes to cin­e­mas in the US on 18 June, and then the UK on 30 July.