Searching for Sugar Man

Directed by Malik Bendjelloul

(PG-13)

***

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This documentary is “unequivocally a must for any music fan,” said Claudia Puig in USA Today. Yet its story about Sixto Rodriguez, a Mexican-American folk singer, also shouldn’t be missed by “anyone who enjoys a well-crafted, edge-of-the-seat, real-life thriller.” Back in the early 1970s, Rodriguez recorded an album of protest songs that flopped in the U.S. but developed a huge following in South Africa, even as the Detroit native was resigning himself to a career as a manual laborer. Director Malik Bendjelloul has turned the tale into “a slow tease of a film,” re-creating two fans’ recent search for their lost idol, said Betsy Sharkey in the Los Angeles Times. Lacking footage of the young Rodriguez, Bendjelloul uses hand-drawn sketches of the singer “with such subtlety” that a viewer can barely discern when animation dissolves into reality. “The movie teeters close to embracing bromides about the healing power of pop culture,” said Manohla Dargis in The New York Times. Still, “there’s too much sincerity in Searching for Sugar Man, too much love and enduring human mystery for cynicism to take hold.”