Awakening in a parallel world where The Beatles never existed, frustrated songwriter Jack Malik (Himesh Patel) seizes an opportunity: he can pass off Beatles’ songs as his own. It becomes his ticket to ride.
That’s the premise of Yesterday, the amusing new film by British director Danny Boyle (Slumdog Millionaire, Trainspotting). In a splendidly edited sequence, the lights go out across the world while Jack pedals home to his parents’ house on his bike. During the 12-second blackout, Jack is hit by a bus and flung into the air. While recovering in the hospital, he notices something amiss. His best friend (not quite girlfriend) Ellie (Lily James) is puzzled by his reference to The Beatles’ “When I’m 64.” Celebrating his homecoming with Ellie and friends, he begins singing “Yesterday.” Their jaws drop at its brilliance. They’ve never heard anything like it.
And when he protests that it’s not his song—it’s The Beatles!—they have no idea what he’s going on about. “The insect beetles or the car Beetles?” asks Rocky (Joel Fry), the sort of good-natured, parasitic doofus that tends to hang around every music scene.
Later, Jack panics when he rifles through the Bs in his LP collection: Lots of Bowie, no Beatles. He Googles their name and finds only the insect. He tries Sgt. Pepper and gets a chili pepper. John Paul George and Ringo turns up as John Paul II. And by the way, Oasis never existed in this world either.
Patel plays the role well. Only the momentary hesitation when he plays “Let it Be” for the first time, the occasional shadow of doubt on his face, reveals that he’s troubled over living a lie. His career ascent is not inevitable but results from his own low-level hustling coupled with luck. A local record producer (this is Suffolk, not London) records him and Jack gives the CD away to customers at his stock-boy job at the British equivalent of Costco. This leads to a spot-on local TV whose host announces him as the “singing wholesaler.”
But the show is seen by popular U.K. singer-songwriter Ed Sheeran, playing himself. Sheeran turns up at Jack’s parents’ door and offers him a chance to open for his Moscow concert. Jack accepts and knocks out the crowd with “Back in the U.S.S.R.”
Impressed by Jack’s performance, Sheeran’s high-powered manager, Debra Hammer (Kate McKinnon), puts him in an L.A. studio to record “the era-defining double album that changes popular music forever.” With her nasal-flat American accent, her humorless bluntness and proud declaration that people are nothing but “product” (or they’re nothing at all), she is a recognizable denizen of the entertainment industry.
Debra offers Jack the “poison chalice of money and fame.” Will Jack drink from it? He swallows his doubts even when he’s asked to change “Hey Jude” to the more affable “Hey Dude” and his album titles are rejected. Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band is too wordy. The White Album has “diversity issues.” And there is anxiety. What if somewhere in this familiar yet strange world (no Coca Cola on the planet, only Pepsi) someone knows of The Beatles? What if he’s called out as history’s greatest plagiarist?
The global blackout, the parallel dimension and even the hesitant love story with Ellie form a theatrical framework allowing the always music-conscious Boyle and his screenwriter Richard Curtis (Bridget Jones’s Diary) to ponder the state of pop culture. Genius has shriveled in the 21st century when a dozen creative non-entities labor over a single tuneless track on a platinum album. Back in the day, John Lennon and Paul McCartney turned out brilliance by the bushel in a six-year period. Boyle has a good time mocking the machinery of marketing and exploring the very British tendency to worry over rising too far and leaving behind the satisfaction of everyday life.
Yesterday succeeds in letting us feel what it might be like to hear those songs for the first time. With its look-at-me filmmaking of zooms and repetitions and sandpapery humor, it’s cheeky British in style and tone with no concessions to the Debra Hammers of this world.
