Yesterday Overview: Where I spoil the mess out of the movie.

Pretty much as much as the promos do.

You likely know most of the story: Jack Malik wakes up from a bike vs bus accident (prompted by a worldwide power outage) to discover that he’s lost his front teeth. Then things get weird.

Just another failed singer/songwriter, Jack was resigned to amusing his friends and filling lonely evenings with his capable covers and modest original songs. Gifted a new guitar after his accident, he plays “Yesterday” for his friends. They respond with the stunned silence that accompanies moving artistic performances.

Shocked by their reaction, Jack insists the song was written by John Lennon and Paul McCartney. His friends don’t know the names, and look at him quizzically when he talks about the Beatles.

While we must consider that the movie is set in Lowestoft, on the opposite side of the UK from Liverpool, it is still improbable that his friends would not have known of the Beatles. Thus we are transported into a new reality.

Trying to solve this mystery, Jack searches for evidence of the Beatles. However, he can’t find them on the internet, or in his record collection. He falls back on the final, conclusive evidence-seeking step utilized by every determined reporter before him*: he runs through the rain to get a friend’s confirmation that she wasn’t pranking him by stealing his albums, scrubbing the internet of any reference, and pretending not to have heard of Sir Richard Starkey^, known to many of us as Ringo Starr.

What the movie gets right

The plot twist is original (at least a LOT of reviewers like this one thought so) and it is all carried off well. It helps facilitate the real story at the heart of every good movie — the emotional growth of our protagonist.

Himesh Patel is strong as the good natured main character, frustrated by the lack of success in following his dream. His performances are genuine and play a large, but not outsized role in the movie. After all, in a movie about the Beatles, the songs really couldn’t be made too prominent.

Patel’s musical performances, singing and playing, are honest and inviting.

His character, Jack, does what we would do in that situation^, he decides to profit from it. He determines he will present the Beatles’ songs as his own. Predictably, he has a meteoric career path. Others use him to make money too. He meets celebrities and wrestles with his conscience.

Ultimately he decides to admit his flaws and his thievery to return to the life, and the woman, he loved before.

What the movie gets disturbingly wrong

This can’t actually happen.

I don’t mean that in a space-time-continuum-matter-and-anti-matter-infinite-energy sort of can’t happen. I don’t even mean that in an I-hate-going-to-movies-because-they’re-not-documentaries sort of can’t happen.

When I pay $10 to recline in a soft pleather barcalounger with eighty strangers, I generally count on the impossible taking place on the screen.

I mean this in a no-way-are-these-songs-a-hit-without-the-Beatles-themselves sort of way.

That is, the song and the performer are inextricably linked. Every day competent songwriters pen brilliant songs. Every day stunningly talented musicians polish their skills. And, time and time again, the two fail to meet.

A hit song is genuinely rare. Multiple hit songs from the same writer and performer are even less common.

The song and the performer depend on one another. A big part of why we love the song is because we love the artist behind it, or we at least understand their story. And the artist, or their story, makes the song greater.

Sure, a truly timeless song like “Yesterday” likely would have charted even if first performed by a merely competent artist without the Beatles’ backstory.

I mean, just yes.

However, your run-of-the-mill “Long and Winding Road” depends on the myth of the Beatles to escape an album, or to even get recorded. (Send your hate mail to bankruptcydepartment@Forever21.com.) Without the public breakup of the greatest band of the British Invasion, this syrupy-sweet song of emotional distance is forgotten, and is lucky to be released later by Wings as a b-side to “Maybe I’m Amazed,” replacing a different version of “Maybe I’m Amazed.”^

Raise your hand if you saw Coldplay on tour after they “broke up”.

Oh, and what else did we lose in this blackout? The Beatles, sure, and Harry Potter, and more … but the musical losses might have been greater than we are told.

When Jack’s friend says about him, “No one has ever written so many great songs,” it is a bridge too far. Am I supposed to understand that this is also a modern world that never had Prince?

Then … no Bangles? Morris Day? Sinead’s “Nothing Compares 2 U”?

See what I’m doing here? But that’s a different article.

Beatles songs are inextricably linked with the Beatles — and the time

My point is that in the case of legends, the song and the artist are almost the same thing. They are linked in time and space, to a moment of personality and performance.

“Hey Jude” — updated to “Hey Dude” with a friendly assist from Ed Sheeran — works alright as a standalone song and makes the trailer as a funny one liner. I’d give it an other-band-could-pull-it-off-ability rating of 6. However, it is a classic in the Beatles universe not for the allusion to drug use, but for the back story that it was originally written to encourage John Lennon’s son Julian^ to record the album Valotte*.

I don’t know if anyone other than “peak Beatles” gets away with a na-na-na fadeout that contributes nearly half of the song’s length.

The song “I Want to Hold Your Hand” is necessarily not just of the Beatles, but of the time. The innocence of the message fits well the innocence of the beginning of that era, as our Liverpool heroes were helping transition American radios from “Unchained Melody” to “Fortunate Son.”

Okay, I sped things up a bit, but you understand.

In this movie. “I Want…” is theoretically released post-Sgt. Pepper’s. In real time, these were the grittier, facial-haired Beatles. The ones you didn’t take home to mom. The ones who recorded the complicated* and hauntingly lovely* “I Want to Hold Your Hand” second-date sequel* “Why Don’t We Do It In The Road?”

Sure, in this movie ALL the songs are post-Pepper. But it stretches credulity to suggest that “I Want to Hold Your Hand” would hold up in a modern release. “I Want…” is a song of innocent love written by bob-haired British lads, not the pot-smoking Abbey Road Beatles. The odds of that song, released by someone we haven’t heard of, charting today? 1 out of 10. (My chart doesn’t go to 0.)

I mean, really? Can you imagine wedging that in between Lana Del Ray and Kanye in your playlist?

In the year that the Beatles shouted that they wanted to hold hands, the edgier and bluesier Rolling Stones were recording the Muddy Waters song, “I Just Want to Make Love To You.”^ It was relatively shocking.

Great bands, however, transcend their music and imbue each song with some of their own greatness. At the peak of their influence the Beatles could cause fans to scream until they passed out. Freddie Mercury from Queen could lead an entire stadium in a sing-along. Beyoncé could stop a whole nation for a halftime performance.

U2 could insert their album in every. Apple. Product.

These things could be accomplished with songs that are merely ok, in some cases.

This isn’t what you think it is

I’m not saying “don’t see the movie.” I promise I’m not. It’s good. You’ll enjoy the characters and their story arc, the music is really strong, and the ending is satisfying, if imperfect.

Just don’t blindly accept that a genuinely nice and good-looking singer-songwriter could steal any Beatles song and take it to the chart.

That’s not how songwriting and performing work.

Sometimes a song can be made great simply by being performed by a great or merely renowned artist.

I mean, it’s not Coldplay. It’s not “Fix You.”

*not really. I’m employing irony as humor to provide emotional support for Beatles fans.

^really. I’m including facts to make my opinions more palatable.

I was really shocked to find that a couple of months before I wrote this, Noah Berlatsky made the same observation more comprehensively at Vox: https://www.vox.com/culture/2019/6/28/18677988/yesterday-movie-the-beatles-music-meritocracy.