The soundtracks for films like Mary Poppins, The Jungle Book and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang have entertained the young and the young at heart for over 40 years, but have you ever thought about the men behind those memorable songs? Probably not. Songwriters, like screenwriters, are the great, unsung heroes of the business they play in. They’re probably most deserving of the credit, but they actually get very little of it. The first ones blamed when something goes wrong, the last ones to get a shout out at an awards toast. It’s a difficult job, but somebody has to do it, and few did it better than Bob and Dick Sherman.

The new documentary The Boys takes the audience behind the scenes through the deeply personal story of two highly talent brothers that could make beautiful music together, but only for someone else’s story and never their own. The movie can at times be touching, ripe with that sense of childhood discovery of these wonderful songs as you relive their creation through the remembrances of the Shermans. At the same time though, the film can be as irritable as a tooth ache, the slightest brush of the cheek sends pain reverberating through the jaw bone. It’s a powerful combination, I just wish the one had been as potent as the other.

But if the stinging bite of family dysfunction isn’t as biting as it should be, it’s difficult to lay fault at the filmmakers because, after all, it’s their own family dysfunction they’re exploiting. *** and *** Sherman are the sons of Bob and Dick respectively, and they know better than anyone the rift that existed between the brothers in their personal lives having lived it and spent their lives trying to understand it. This film is an extension of that attempted understanding, and while I get the difficulty as young men trying to reconcile why your grandparents’ funerals had two receptions each, it feels that they’re barely able to scratch the surface at that story behind the story.

Instead, a lot of time in the film is spent talking about the “glory days,” those meetings with the great benevolent Walt Disney where it rained creative gold with every stroke of the ivory keys. It’s not that that kind of story or information isn’t important or interesting, but somewhere between the successes and the awards and the passing of Disney and working next with Chubby Brocoli, the film seems to skim over where this rift came from. It’s kind of implied that it was always there, that Bob’s war time experiences fighting his way to Germany with the US army and coming home injured, had a pronounced impact on the older brother that the younger Dick could never understand. But that’s never made clear.

I appreciate the danger in reopening old wounds, and maybe the younger Shermans found some solace, but as an audience member looking at things from the outside I was still unsure about the psychology. It just seems that there’s a large whole in the film that’s never filled despite the fact that filling it was the point of the whole thing to begin with. However, considering that it’s a Disney movie about key Disney myth-makers being made their own family, there’s still a surprisingly raw edge to the documentary. Between this and the Toronto Film Festival entry Waking Sleeping Beauty, it seems as if Disney’s entering a serious period of self-reflection, and I’m fine with that. Is there a kid on Earth that’s not touched by Disney in some way? Doubtful. So next time your thinking “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” keep in mind that the two guys that wrote it thought each other rather atrocious. A typically Hollywood story if I’ve ever heard it.