Film Review - Yesterday (12A)

Sometimes it feels like someone else has written all the songs.

Some movie pitches just sound like gold. Yesterday taps into a notion many of us have considered - how the world would have differed without this or that cultural phenomenon. What if there'd been no Mozart, or Shakespeare, or (heaven forbid the thought) Doctor Who? How impoverished would we all have been? Danny Boyle's new film puts a Beatles-shaped hole in history and asks an unlikely hero to fill it. The results, while not the pure eighteen-carat I might have hoped, are shiny enough to light up a darkened cinema space this summer movie season. Here comes a considerable amount of sun.

Himesh Patel is Jack Malik, an aspiring singer-songwriter whose career is resolutely failing to launch, despite the encouragements of his manager/best friend Ellie (Lily James). Some bizarre cosmic fluctuation causes all the lights on Earth to blink off and on, during which time Jack sustains a traffic-related head injury. When he wakes, he is the only person who remembers The Beatles or any of their music. The band, it seems, has been erased from all of history, aside from Jack's mind. So when he begins to sing and play their songs, it opens up the possibility of that elusive music career - just so long as his conscience can cope with passing off John, Paul, George and Ringo's creativity as his own. 

Yesterday is almost destined to be divisive. Writer Richard Curtis is the doyen of the high-concept British rom-com, while director Boyle is chiefly known for the edgily propulsive feel he brings to challenging screenplays. Fans of the Trainspotting films, or even Slumdog Millionaire (which has a lot more grit than you may remember) may simply not be on board with Curtis' patented brand of romantic optimism. On the other hand those who found Love Actually a bit too sentimental may well appreciate the tempering of the writer's more sugary inclinations by some of Boyle's bite.

There's much that this duo's love-letter to the Fab Four gets right, not least the fun it has with that delicious central premise. Jack is burdened with a mission to re-introduce The Beatles to the world, while simultaneously indulging in an opportunism that will grant him the success he lacked. His first faltering steps with tunes he already knows to be great are mined productively for laughs, as is his wrestling with half-remembered lyrics. There are great moments too as the Beatles' songs clash with a 21st century music industry that in some cases doesn't know what to do with them. (Kate McKinnon has fun here as a grotesquely avaricious music executive.)

That the classic tunes work so well is due in no small part to Patel (Tamwar Masood in BBC soap Eastenders), who reinterprets them with a freshness and passion enhanced by their extraordinary context. Boyle meanwhile emphasises the growing sense of guilt and lostness the musician feels, as success and Malik-mania begin to escalate. James radiates her trademark earnestness as lovelorn Ellie (she makes everything better, Mamma Mia 2 included, just  by showing up), while Ed Sheeran proves willing to be the butt of the film's jokes as an understated version of himself. Sanjeev Bhaskar and Meera Syal are good comic value as Jack's genially clueless parents and Joel Fry nimbly steals a clutch of scenes as shambling roadie-pal Rocky, even if he the character is a clear rip-off of Notting Hill's Spike.

That ripping off of past Curtis movies is perhaps Yesterday's biggest issue. Jack and Ellie's unrequited love-plot is written in a way that can distract from the central vanished-Beatles idea, particularly in the final act. It's played with admirable conviction by the leads, but still has a tendency to drag things back into overly familiar Four Weddings and a Funeral territory, rather than dovetail unobtrusively into the story as a whole.

Thankfully the story sticks to its guns re its core premise, even if it does embrace classic Curtis rom-com tropes towards the end. What we're really interested in is Jack's whole non-existent Beatles dilemma and on that front the film follows through, avoiding any narrative cop-outs and refusing, Groundhog Day-style, to explain the weird glitch in reality. Admittedly the underlying notion is fundamentally daft and begs all kinds of knock-on time travel-ly issues that the film barely addresses, but brush all that aside. It's a neat conceit with which both writer and director have a lot of fun, more than enough to make the enterprise worthwhile. Plus it's great to hear all those magnificent songs reworked. In the circumstances what else could Jack have done?

Seriously, imagine there's no Beatles...

Gut Reaction: A pretty high laughter-to-joke percentage rate, while the music simply made me happy. One iconic song intro had we properly tearing up.

Memorable Moment: Jack endeavours to 'Let It Be'. 

Ed's Verdict: 7/10. The resorting to romantic cliche is too obvious, but as an exploration of Jack in a Beatle-less world this hits all the right Mersey beats.