Danny Boyle’s Yesterday asks a question that sounds like a gift: what if you were the only person on Earth who remembered the Beatles? The film answers it, and the answer is a letdown. Jack Malik, a struggling singer-songwriter from Lowestoft, gets his wish and spends most of the movie looking miserable about it. Yesterday runs 116 minutes. In this paper’s view it is a comedy, fantasy, music and romance picture that never commits fully to any of the four.
The premise is the best thing the film has. A 12-second global power failure hits while Jack is crossing the street, and a bus hits him. When he wakes up, the Beatles never existed. Their records are gone from his collection. Searches turn up nothing. Everyone around him hears “Yesterday” as an original. The tagline says it plainly: “Everyone in the world has forgotten The Beatles. Everyone except Jack…”
Trailer, via Universal Pictures UK.
Himesh Patel Sings for Himself
Himesh Patel carries the movie. Boyle cast him after hearing him audition with “Yesterday” and “Back in the U.S.S.R.” Boyle said Patel’s voice had soul. That judgment holds up. Patel sings and plays guitar and piano himself, and the performance scenes are the only stretches where Yesterday feels alive rather than assembled.
Lily James plays Ellie Appleton, Jack’s manager and childhood friend. She is a mathematics teacher who pushes him not to quit. She is also, for most of the runtime, a device. The script needs someone to believe in Jack before the world does, and someone to be hurt when the world does. James does what she can with it. The film does not give her much.
Richard Curtis wrote the screenplay with Jack Barth, from a story by the two of them. Curtis built a career on this exact shape: a decent man, a patient woman, a misunderstanding, a dash to the airport. Yesterday follows the shape without the spark.
Two Beatles Rights and a $10 Million Bill
The filmmakers paid $10 million for the rights to use the Beatles’ music. That number sits against a $26 million production budget, and it is the clearest statement of what the film values.
None of the Beatles were involved. Boyle still got approval from them or their families. Ringo Starr sent a reply Boyle called “lovely.”
Production was first reported in March 2018. Filming began in April around England, particularly Norfolk and Halesworth in Suffolk. Crews also shot at Wembley Stadium, the Principality Stadium, and in Los Angeles. The film premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival on 4 May 2019. Universal Pictures released it in the UK and the US on 28 June.
It grossed $154.6 million worldwide against that $26 million budget. The reviews were mixed.
The Cast, and Who Almost Had the Sheeran Part
Ed Sheeran plays himself. Kate McKinnon plays Debra Hammer, the ruthless Los Angeles manager who signs Jack and engineers his rise to global fame. Joel Fry is Rocky, Jack’s friend and roadie. The rest of the cast:
- Sophia Di Martino as Carol
- Ellise Chappell as Lucy
- Meera Syal as Sheila Malik
- Harry Michell as Nick
- Vincent Franklin as Brian
- Sanjeev Bhaskar as Jed Malik
- Michael Kiwanuka as himself
- James Corden as himself
- Robert Carlyle, uncredited, as a 78-year-old John Lennon
Sheeran’s role was first written for Coldplay’s Chris Martin, who turned it down. Sheeran said Harry Styles was also asked. Boyle denied that.
A Plot That Runs on Its Own Momentum
Jack starts performing the songs as his own. Ellie gets him a demo with Gavin, a local producer. A local television performance leads to Sheeran inviting Jack to open for him in Moscow. Ellie has a parents’ evening and stays home. Rocky goes instead.
After the Moscow gig, Jack plays “The Long and Winding Road” to beat Sheeran in a songwriting duel. In Los Angeles, McKinnon’s Debra signs him. Ellie confesses she has always been in love with him at his going-away party. Jack moves to LA and starts recording at EastWest Studios. He cannot remember the lyrics to “Eleanor Rigby.”
That last detail is the only genuinely interesting problem the film poses. A man who has been handed the greatest catalog in popular music is running out of it. He goes to Liverpool hoping to jog his memory, visiting Strawberry Field, Penny Lane, and the grave of Eleanor Rigby. Ellie joins him. They share a drunken evening and a kiss. She tells him she is not interested in him that way.
The Beatles Are the Least Interesting Thing Here
Here is the trouble, as this paper reads it. Yesterday has a premise that could support a thriller, a satire, or a tragedy. It chooses none of them. It chooses a romance in which the romance is underdeveloped, and a fame story in which the fame is never examined.
The Beatles’ absence could mean something. In my reading the film treats it as a trivia fact. Jack’s guilt about passing off the songs never curdles into anything. His rise is montage. His crisis is a blank page and a trip to Liverpool.
Boyle knows how to make a movie move. Here he mostly stays out of the way. The songs do the work the script should be doing, or so it seems to me. When Patel sits at a piano and plays, the film is briefly worth the ticket. When he stops, it deflates.
The supporting cast is stranded. McKinnon’s Debra reads to me as a cartoon executive with no interior. Fry’s Rocky is comic relief whose jokes, in this view, do not land. Di Martino, Chappell, Syal, Michell, Franklin and Bhaskar appear, register, and vanish.
What $154.6 Million Actually Buys
A $154.6 million worldwide gross against a $26 million budget is the number Universal will point to. It tells you what audiences wanted: the songs. They came for the catalog and the fantasy of hearing it fresh.
They got a movie that, in this paper’s reading, treats the catalog as a jukebox and the fantasy as a premise to be resolved as quickly as possible. The $10 million music rights figure is the most honest number in the production. It says what Yesterday is. My view is that it is a film built around access to a songbook, and everything else — the romance, the fame satire, the alternate-reality mechanics — was assembled around that access rather than grown from it.
The 12-second power failure is never explained. That is fine. Not every fantasy needs a rulebook. But the film also never puts the failure to use, as I see it. It is a switch, not an idea.
The Real Question the Film Refuses
Yesterday had one question worth asking: what does it cost to be the only person who knows something beautiful? In my reading Jack never pays it. The film sets up its central impossibility and then declines to draw anything out of it.
The Beatles are not characters in Yesterday. They are inventory. The film’s best scene, to my mind, is Patel alone with a guitar. The film’s worst instinct is to keep cutting away from him to plot.
Robert Carlyle’s uncredited turn as a 78-year-old John Lennon is the one moment where the film gestures at the weight of what it has erased, and it is a cameo. I would have made it the spine.
Score: 5.5 of 10
Yesterday is a $26 million movie that spent $10 million on songs and treated everything else as filler. Himesh Patel is genuinely good and deserved a better script. Lily James is given a role that exists to serve Jack’s arc and then told to step out of it. Boyle directs with competence and no conviction.
The premise is strong enough that the film’s failure is instructive. A world without the Beatles should feel like a loss. Yesterday makes it feel like a licensing deal. The $154.6 million gross says audiences showed up for the music. The mixed reviews suggest some of them wanted more. The Beatles’ catalog survives the movie intact. The movie does not survive its own idea.
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