The reason Backbeat was so impressive at the time was that it all but ignores this. It establishes that this is a story of the pre-fame days of the biggest band in history and then relaxes to tell the story of the kind of intense relationships we have when we're young adults. It might, of course, have been about a fictitious group but this story was already there in the timeline. Adding what the audience knows is to come brings a zest to it. This means, that when we start with a difficult shared experience with John and Stu we're happy to continue with them without gagging to see the whole band. When we do, it's a joy. They're wise cracking as they load their equipment on to the ship bound for Hamburg and later they do what made them famous. By then, all expectations catered to, we relax into the love story between Stu and Astrid which has two triangles attached to it from John's unquestioned love of Stu and Astrid's lifelong love Klaus. When we get Beatles content it's just part of the mix.
On that, an astute decision was made. The sets that the band plays don't need any Lennon MacCartney numbers. There were so few that their absence would not be missed in this context. So, it was the more easily cleared Little Richard and Chuck Berry and Frank Ifield etc. which is how the sets would have sounded. And then this was recorded by a group of current indy rock figures from the '90s, members of Nirvana, R.E.M. (well, they had been indy), Sonic Youth and so on. While the first number we see the band play sounds a little too slick and tight, later songs have a more realistic raggedness which feels a lot more live.
The club scenes also feel credible with a mix of sailors and roughnecks there for the strippers (and some for the rock and roll) and students for the spectacle and scene. And there are some fine cinematic moments of world building showing the seedy Reeperbahn, chief among which is the elongated entrance of Astrid in a taxi, shot from above the bonnet, reflecting the neon, as it courses through the night life like a shark. Montages of the band trading time on the stage with the strippers is narratively sound as well as diverting. Astrid's photography of the band in various locations for images that would enter history is also a montage with a thrilling feel.
If there are flies in the unguent here they are in the dialogue that presages phrases that came later. John describing the endless sets they had to do as a hard day's night, is very whiffy but there are also lines from that movie and Stu talks about feeling like he's working eight days a week. The earlier, starker, The Hours and Times, set at the start of Beatlemania, resisted this, though it might have credibly put them in. The later Nowhere Boy not only steered completely clear of this but never mentioned the band's name once. Their appearance in Backbeat is wince-inducing in a film otherwise so meticulous to show the rougher aspects of being in a band when that young. We get the micro-resentment, the rivalry for the leader's attention, the ridicule and ragging outside of the glory moments onstage where all the dreams are fulfilled (well, not even there). This feels authentic. Like a fair few people I know, I was in a few bands at this level (don't ask, you will not have heard of any of them) and never encountered an outfit that didn't have conflict evident with the slightest of surface scratches. It's the crowning achievement of Backbeat insofar as it is a Beatles film. The cute anachronisms in the dialogue leave an unpleasant taste.
Stephen Dorf gives us a cool but awestruck artist, ready to break out of the increasingly evident confines of band life. Sheryl Lee, who had signed on for Twin Peaks to play a corpse but ended up as its strongest cast member, is utterly solid as the young overconfident student, spouting aphorisms that would've sounded profound and exciting to a nineteen year old. She speaks them with a knowing curl, aware that they are largely the kind of descant to her cool nightlife. Outside of that context she delivers a genuineness that lets us warm to her. But this is Ian Hart's film as John Lennon, pained and witty, loving and destructive, driven and lazy. Unless I'm physically in front of this movie I recall the role actually played by a young John Lennon, so close is the look and my projected persona. This is the same as Hart's turn in The Hours and Times, even with an awkward Beatle wig, I recall the performance the same way.
The rock band movie sub genre is plagued by hokum. Even when it's a fictitious group and doesn't have to play up (or down) to history it can get dodgy. Eddie and The Cruisers is one of the worst bunglings of a decent idea I've seen to the point where just recalling it feels embarrassing. David Chase's Not Fade Away is so long and too realistic it just ends up being boring. It's worse when it's a real band, though. Oliver Stone's The Doors does even more damage through idolisation than the execrable Jerry Hopkins biography No One Here Gets Out Alive. Sid and Nancy is another exercise in how to render an interesting subject cringey through being too clearly a fan's view. It's always odd to me that something as invigorating as cinema can fail at capturing the excitement of rock music so very consistently.
Some get through. Expresso Bongo is bizarre enough to stand on its own as a kind of early rock fantasy. The Cliff Richard movies are acceptable cheese for admitting that they're showbiz first. If you want something with genuine drama and good performances, go back to Jailhouse Rock. It works. That'll be the Day is very good but it sequel Stardust is a messy failure. I like Control more than the eponymous documentary about Joy Division. On that, the best films about rock and roll have been straight up doccos rather than fictionalisation.
As to the films from the Beatles themselves, their first feature is a joy, the second a blithering mess with unresolved industrial racism, their own production only good for its music video moments, the big animation more than passable rainy afternoon entertainment and then there's the depressing Let it Be. It makes me grateful that the only movies that their rivals in chief made were a good concert/interview film (Charlie is My Darling) and a compelling and troubling one (Gimme Shelter) without a scripted line of dialogue for the running time.
Why I still like Backbeat so much is in its resistance to idolatry. Sweep the goofy future lines aside and you have a worthy love story in the foreground with a fraught one of creative life and fame chasing beneath. Those are the right stage placements and priorities, here, so that a well turned world can be built that keeps its gifts on display without the need to break anything. The coda sequence of the statements of what happened to the major players has been a feature plaguing retrospective cinema since American Graffiti. They appear over home movie style footage of a day at the beach and, really are completely unnecessary. Then again, Sam Taylor Johnson did the same thing in Nowhere Boy and it, too, might have escaped without them. The very last one in Backbeat is an unacknowledged pointer to the film's source. It's about Astrid and how the project was born from interviews with her about those times. I wonder if we might not just have had that one for poignancy.
No comments:
Post a Comment