Searching for Sugar Man (2012)
Some stories are so strange and so complete that they seem almost fictional, and the story at the heart of Searching for Sugar Man is one of them. Rodriguez, born Sixto Diaz Rodriguez in Detroit to Mexican immigrant parents, recorded two albums in the early 1970s, Cold Fact and Coming from Reality, to near-total commercial indifference in the United States. The records died quietly. Rodriguez returned to manual labour. That should have been the end of it. Except that, somehow, those records found their way to South Africa, where they circulated on bootleg tapes throughout the apartheid era and eventually turned their author into a genuine cultural phenomenon, a figure whose music was woven into the fabric of a generation's coming-of-age. The gap between those two realities, obscurity in one country, legend in another, is the engine that drives the film.
The documentary was made by Swedish director Malik Bendjelloul, who is something of a fascinating figure in his own right. Searching for Sugar Man was his feature debut, produced across several years on a notoriously threadbare budget (Bendjelloul famously used an iPhone app to shoot some sequences when he ran out of money for film stock). It was picked up by Passion Pictures, Red Box Films and Canfield Pictures, and went on to win the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature in 2013, as well as the BAFTA in the same category. That kind of recognition is genuinely rare for a first film, and it says something about the power of the underlying material. The screenplay, such as it is, was developed with Stephen Segerman and Craig Bartholomew Strydom, two South Africans who were themselves part of the investigative story at the film's centre. Bendjelloul also edited the film himself, which gives the whole thing a consistency of sensibility, even if that sensibility is, as you will read, a matter of some debate.
The principal figures on screen are Segerman and Rodriguez himself, along with Rodriguez's daughters Regan and Eva, and record producer Mike Theodore, who worked with Rodriguez during those original Detroit sessions. Rodriguez, when we see him, carries himself with a quiet, weathered dignity that is striking without being performed. There is no artifice in his manner, and it makes him an unusual documentary subject, someone around whom meaning accumulates rather than someone who pushes it forward. For a companion piece on music documented on film rather than reconstructed, see also my thoughts on Queen: Live at the Rainbow '74, which raises its own questions about how performance and myth feed one another.
Cinematographer Camilla Skagerström shoots the film in two distinct registers: the sun-bleached streets and interiors of South Africa, warm and slightly overexposed, all dust and faded colour, against the grey, industrial palette of Detroit in winter, brickwork and snow and long shadows. The contrast does a good deal of thematic work without the film ever having to spell it out. The score draws heavily on Rodriguez's own recordings, which means the film lives and breathes by the quality of his music. No credited composer shapes the sonic environment beyond that source material, and the decision to let the songs carry the emotional weight is, for better or worse, the central craft choice the film makes. On the question of how well the editing holds all of this together, and what the overall cumulative effect amounts to, the review below speaks directly to that.
Searching for Sugar Man tells a remarkable story, and it leans on that story almost entirely. Its subject is Rodriguez, a Detroit musician, the son of Mexican immigrants, who released a record or two in the early seventies, barely sold a copy at home, and dropped out of sight. What he never knew was that, on the other side of the world, his music had caught fire: in South Africa he became an icon, bigger than almost anyone, and all sorts of wild legends grew up around him, including lurid rumours that he had died. The film follows two South African fans setting out to discover what truly became of the man.
It reminded me a great deal of the Blaze Foley story, and of Blaze, the film about him, which I have a lot of time for. Foley is one of my favourite musicians, another gifted outsider who went largely unrecognised in his own lifetime, only for a legend to bloom around him afterwards. Rodriguez belongs to that same strange club, the artist the world almost missed entirely, and there is something oddly moving about how these reputations can lie dormant for decades and then suddenly ignite.
The thing is, it is the myth that makes the documentary, far more than the documentary itself. As a piece of filmmaking I would not call it especially accomplished; the storytelling is functional, the documenting workmanlike, and if the tale at its heart were any less extraordinary I suspect it would be fairly forgettable. It is fine. It is interesting enough. It is simply not, in itself, particularly well made.
What saves it, and nearly lifts it, is the music. Rodriguez's songs are the true revelation here, and they are excellent, far too good to have been ignored the way they were. By the end you understand exactly why a whole country fell for them. Three stars. A fascinating story and a terrific soundtrack wrapped in a merely functional film, well worth a watch for the man and his music, if not for the craft.
Searching for Sugar Man sits in an interesting place on the documentary shelf, close to the territory I covered in my review of The Barkley Marathons: The Race That Eats Its Young, another documentary where an extraordinary true story does a significant amount of the heavy lifting for the film around it. Both are well worth seeing, and both invite the same quiet question: what would they be without their remarkable subjects? In Rodriguez's case, the answer is probably not very much, but that caveat does not diminish what he made. The songs survive the film that frames them, which is, in its own way, the whole point.
Rating: ★★★½ | Year: 2012 | Watched: 2026-10-21
Trailer
▶ Watch the official trailer for Searching for Sugar Man (2012) on YouTube
Where to watch
Watch in the UK
Stream: Now TV Cinema · Studiocanal Presents Amazon Channel
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Stream: Hulu
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Physical: Amazon US
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