Yesterday, a new film directed by Danny Boyle (Trainspotting, Slumdog Millionaire) and written by Richard Curtis (Love Actually, Notting Hill), is a movie about how great the Beatles’ songs are.
So great, in fact, that if one random British dude could perform these songs to an unsuspecting world that had never heard them, he’d be the biggest star in the world basically overnight.
It’s a twist on the time-travel advantage where a dude from the future knows everything that’s going to happen.
It’s also a cute flip of the biggest outrage in Back To The Future – the idea that a white guy actually “wrote” ‘Johnny B Goode’ instead of Chuck Berry. (Who was a huge influence on The Beatles. Screenwriting is a flat circle.)
This premise sounds too wild to work, and it’s a massive gamble, but there’s a lot going for it.
While the last big-budget attempt at a Beatles jukebox movie, Across The Universe, ended up a bit too wacky to work, Yesterday is aiming squarely at crowd-pleasing, feel-good blockbuster in the style of its creators’ biggest hits. It’s like About Time’s magic trickery crossed with Slumdog‘s rags-to-riches vibe plus a bit of That Thing You Do.
And it’s a good mix of charismatic stars – Lily James in full dream-girl-next-door mode, my queen and yours Kate McKinnon dripping BDE as Jack’s American agent, cameos from James Corden and, uh, Ed Sheeran – and what looks like a great find in star Himesh Patel, a largely unknown UK soap actor with a killer smile and an aw-shucks energy that will make us want him to actually get away with stealing some of the greatest songs ever written.
Please, please let this be as good as we’re hoping. Ed Sheeran and all.
Yesterday is out June 27.