Yes­ter­day

Imag­ine this hor­ror sce­nario: You’re in a room full of peo­ple, and a boor­ish man with sil­very hair stands up and loud­ly announces, ​“The Bea­t­les are the best band to have ever exist­ed. The music they pro­duced has and will not be sur­passed.” Now, do you sim­ply take this address with a pinch of salt – as one guy loud­ly artic­u­lat­ing their sub­jec­tive opin­ion? Or, do you sheep­ish­ly wad­dle over to Richard Cur­tis and say, ​“Hi there Richard, while I respect your sub­jec­tive opin­ion on this mat­ter, I feel you should accept that your nar­row-mind­ed and dog­mat­ic take on The Bea­t­les’ out­put may not be shared with­in a uni­ver­sal sphere.” What hap­pens after that is anyone’s guess. Pos­si­bly some kind of com­ic altercation.

Yes­ter­day is a film which hinges on what it believes to be the indis­putable fact that The Bea­t­les were the great­est pop band of all time. The very idea that the art they pro­duced may not be to some tastes, or that the rev­o­lu­tion­ary aspect of their work may have been couched in the spe­cif­ic con­text of the era in which it was pro­duced, are ques­tions with which screen­writer Richard Cur­tis is sub­lime­ly untrou­bled. Also, it’s a film which dis­miss­es the idea that all art con­tains an inex­tri­ca­ble bond with its cre­ator. Appar­ent­ly, The Bea­t­les’ music retains its essen­tial great­ness when per­formed by any old schlub with an acoustic gui­tar. Karaōke and tal­ent show cov­ers are as good as the real thing. George Mar­tin? Get. In. The. Sea.

The sky-high con­cept of the film sees scruff-bag Low­est­oft busker Jack Mal­ick (Himesh Patel) fail­ing to draw crowds with his slight­ly lame bub­blegum pop-rock stom­per, ​‘The Sum­mer Song’. His num­ber one super fan is Ellie (Lily James), who also dou­bles as his man­ag­er. He sees her as the eter­nal BFF and nev­er once ques­tions her exces­sive feal­ty. She des­per­ate­ly wants to be placed in the ​“love” col­umn, but refus­es to make the first move.

Then, one night, by strange cos­mic quirk, the music of The Bea­t­les is erased from exis­tence, except in the mind of Jack, who hap­pens to have mem­o­rised the lyrics to their best-loved hits. Main­ly the ones penned by Mac­ca. It’s a super­hero ori­gin sto­ry, though instead of the old notion of great pow­er requir­ing great respon­si­bil­i­ty, Jack decides to cash this thing with nary a sec­ond thought. He waves good­bye to his friends and fam, and is tak­en under the gild­ed wing of Ed Sheer­an (a sur­pris­ing­ly calm­ing pres­ence) and his coterie of LA phoneys (Kate McK­in­non, very fun­ny as an avari­cious big label manager).

In the moment, Yes­ter­day clips along at a rate of knots, and direc­tor Dan­ny Boyle, flex­ing his Mil­lions mus­cle, builds what may be the opti­mal deliv­ery sys­tem for what tran­spires to be cut-rate mate­r­i­al. It avoids the close-prox­im­i­ty shoot­ing style of TV sit­coms, and Boyle real­ly does his best to make sure that every gag has an odds-on chance of land­ing. The impres­sion is that there was no sin­gle-take improv here – the scenes, the lines and the deliv­ery were repeat­ed until they worked.

Patel makes for a charis­mat­ic lead, and his spir­it­ed per­for­mance goes some way to plug­ging the vast con­tra­dic­tions and flaws with­in his char­ac­ter. The same goes for James, and she does get to do a lit­tle more than just bray from the side­lines. The film works through Jack’s rise to the top, then it piv­ots to a stan­dard, sac­cha­rine-sweet ​“will he get the girl?” sce­nario and toss­es the high con­cept from a high win­dow to its death. Were Cur­tis’ lev­els of intel­lec­tu­al curios­i­ty on a par with his desire to enshrine roman­tic con­formism, we may be on to some­thing. That so lit­tle is going on beneath the sur­face is per­haps what gives the per­for­mances a pleas­ing light­ness and ample room to breathe.

Even­tu­al­ly, the film feels becomes the embod­i­ment of that moment in I’m Alan Par­tridge, where our tav­ern-bound hero reveals that his favourite Bea­t­les album is ​‘The Best of the Bea­t­les’. It craves main­stream accep­tance and – unlike the Bea­t­les – rejects inno­va­tion and a press­ing need to show the audi­ence any­thing they haven’t seen before. The irony of it all is that, in the cold, hard light of day, it’s ​‘The Sum­mer Song’ that would’ve vault­ed Jack to stardom.