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The world needs another Beatles documentary like it needs a live-action remake of “Moana,” but Disney has never met a well it didn’t want to suck dry.
And so, not long after Peter Jackson’s “The Beatles: Get Back” became the must-stream event of Thanksgiving 2021 — a second hyper-restored look back at the band will hit Disney+. This one is called “Beatles ’64,” it’s directed by frequent Martin Scorsese collaborator and “George Harrison: Living in the Material World” editor David Tedeschi (with a technological assist from Jackson’s WingNut Films), and though it’s much shorter than the three-episode miniseries everyone gorged on three years ago, Tedeschi’s 106-minute film operates on much the same principle: It never feels the least bit new or necessary, and yet almost every second of it sparks the joy of a genuine revelation.
Similar to “Get Back,” “Beatles ’64” puts a formative moment from the band’s history under the most extreme of microscopes, effectively slowing a chapter from music history until it seems to be unfolding in real-time right before our eyes (and inside our ears). In this case, that moment is February 1964, when four skinny lads from Liverpool came to America and — during a quick trip to New York City and Washington D.C. — inflamed a concentrated outbreak of Beatlemania into a global pandemic.
And yet, for all the attention Tedeschi pays to the hordes of screaming teenage girls who go completely feral at the mere thought of seeing John, Paul, George, and/or Ringo in the flesh, perhaps the most interesting aspect of his documentary is that it doesn’t frame that madness as a disease so much as the cure for America’s pre-existing condition: the melancholy that followed the assassination of John F. Kennedy.
“Beatles ’64” counters that the Beatles were the first TV rock band — starting with an upbeat montage where a news report declares JFK “the first TV president” (a label later immortalized by the coverage of his death). Tedeschi essentially contextualizes their performance on “The Ed Sullivan Show” — an event watched by 70 million people, and one that has since been suffused with biblical import — as the night that shook a nation of Boomers out of their shell shock and galvanized them into creating a culture of their own, for better or worse. Television broadcast tragedy into their lives, and only television could replace it with something better.
Ominous as an overly broad film about that particular vibe shift might sound, “Beatles ’64” does what it can to emphasize the positive — and downplay its sociopolitical theorizing — by seeing the British Invasion through the eye of the storm. Reworking the vérité footage that Albert and David Maysles shot while embedded with the band (first cut together into their “What’s Happening! The Beatles in the U.S.A.,” and now restored in shimmering 4K by Park Road Post), Tedeschi accentuates how the Beatles’ preternatural calmness only made the chaos around them more compelling and vice-versa.
These Beatles aren’t mop-topped gods alighting upon the mortal world, they’re a bunch of working-class twentysomethings who can’t help but have a laugh at the hysteria they’re causing on their first trip to Manhattan. (Clips from the band’s legendary press conference prove that their sense of humor made almost the same impression as their music.) We see them play the hell out of early hits like “Please Please Me” and “I Wanna Hold Your Hand” a dozen times over, but just as much of the film is devoted to footage of the band goofing around in hotel rooms and having fun with — or at the expense of — local interviewers.
When a reporter asks a young McCartney about his potential impact on Western culture, the frontman’s head-shaking response goes well beyond humility. Were these talented young musicians the heralds of a new moment of the 20th century, or were they the actual moment itself? Television’s reach made the question impossible for anyone to avoid, just as its flatness made the question impossible for anyone to answer conclusively at the time. Tedeschi’s film has a tendency to feel like a rerun, but that friction creates enough unique energy of its own.
It’s a friction that “Beatles ’64” continues into the current day, as the film is sprinkled with a messy but welcome array of talking head interviews that fall into one of two categories. The first: Beatles fans — some famous, some not — speaking to the band’s seismic impact. The second: Members of the Beatles being like “lol we played a show on a rotating stage in Washington D.C. and Ringo’s little area started spinning the wrong way” (McCartney and Starr are both credited producers on this project). David Lynch was at that show, and when he pops up in this doc to talk about it, he sounds as awed and mystified as the rest of us do when we try to talk about the magic of “Twin Peaks.”
One minute author Joe Queenan is reflecting on the first time he heard “She Loves You” (“it was like a light coming on amid total darkness”), and the next, Ringo is showing executive producer Martin Scorsese a collection of the wildest suits he used to wear. One minute, a woman is reminiscing about how she and her friends paid the concierge at the Plaza Hotel for cut-up shreds of bathroom towels from the Beatles’ suite, and the next, Ronnie Spector is on hand to laugh about how she snuck the band up to Harlem so they could enjoy a meal without being recognized. Far too much of the other interview footage feels like filler, especially since Tedeschi includes enough Lennon and Harrison outtakes to remind us that everything that needs to be said has already been said better. But it’s fun to watch the film’s cast grapple with the reality of something that most people only experience through a screen.
For every scene that includes some of the most unguarded and revealing footage of the Beatles that has ever been captured on camera, there’s another, even more compelling scene wher regular people — delirious stans and random passers-by alike — try to make sense of a phenomenon that’s just out of reach. Up the stairs. Down the street. On the TV set a tween girl convinced her parents to let her wheel into the living room during dinner.
For all the build-up to the Beatles’ performance on “The Ed Sullivan Show,” nothing in “Beatles ’64” hits quite as hard as the clip of some enraptured kids watching it at home. Tedeschi cuts to media theorist Marshall McLuhan to explain the power of television, even though few events have made it more obvious that a medium can be inextricable from the message that it sends. As you happily watch another Beatles doc just because it’s available to stream on Disney+ the day after Thanksgiving, that idea will likely feel as true as it’s ever felt before.
Grade: B
“Beatles ’64” will be available to stream on Disney+ starting Friday, November 29.
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