Backbeat (1994)
Director: Iain Softley
Entertainment grade: B+
History grade: A–
John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, Stuart Sutcliffe and Pete Best formed the first lineup of the Beatles in Liverpool in 1960. Sutcliffe left the band in 1961, before they achieved fame, and died of a cerebral haemorrhage in 1962.
Travel
The film begins in the summer of 1960, with the Beatles sailing for the continent. John Lennon (Ian Hart) is sick on Paul McCartney (Gary Bakewell)'s shoes. Possibly this is a metaphor. They are signed up for a three-month residency at a Hamburg club. "It was a jungle of neon and sex," the real Pete Best later told an interviewer, "where every other door seemed to lead to a place where girls were taking off their clothes." The film recreates this, with particular devotion to the historical accuracy of girls taking off their clothes.
Music
The film-makers responded creatively to the fact that they didn't have the right to use any Beatles recordings. They recreated tracks with a covers band featuring Dave Grohl of Nirvana, Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth, and Mike Mills of REM – meaning the Backbeat soundtrack is itself now a noteworthy historical archive of 1990s musicians.
Romance
"It's Stu," McCartney complains to Lennon about Stuart Sutcliffe (Stephen Dorff). "He just stands there." The film is right that Sutcliffe's lack of musical ability was a problem from the start. He was only in the band because he was Lennon's best friend. Predictably, when they get to Hamburg, art school boy Sutcliffe falls head over heels for an ethereal, intellectual German girl with a fashion-forward haircut. This is photographer Astrid Kirchherr (Sheryl Lee, forever recognisable as Laura Palmer from Twin Peaks). She takes Sutcliffe to art student parties, where people in black polo necks listen to free jazz. He is smitten. One detail that the film doesn't include is that going out with a German was still quite a radical thing for a British person to do in 1960. The real Sutcliffe wrote to one of his friends from Hamburg: "I can't really get talking to the German girls because I've still got a guilty conscience about the war." As the film illustrates rather abundantly, the Beatles soon got over that.
Love
The film's strength is the intriguing love triangle between Sutcliffe, Lennon and Kirchherr. Kirchherr tells Lennon he is jealous. "Jealous of Stu?" he sneers. "Jealous of me," she replies. The hints Backbeat drops about an intimate level of attachment between Lennon and Sutcliffe are backed up by Sutcliffe's sister, Pauline Sutcliffe. In her 2001 book The Beatles' Shadow, Pauline considered the possibility that the two men may have had sexual encounters. "They clearly had a very emotionally intimate relationship," she wrote. "Anything could have happened." The film's restrained treatment of their relationship is both historically faithful and gripping. Many viewers may notice a parallel between how Sutcliffe's love affair lessens his commitment to the band, and Lennon's own later situation with Yoko Ono. Thankfully, Backbeat is too smart to make this overt.
Violence
The tension between Sutcliffe and Lennon ends with a physical fight. "In the film Backbeat the confrontation is presented as bloody but in a bloody-nose sort of way," Pauline Sutcliffe wrote, "fisticuffs that end in a tearful hug. That was not even close to what really happened." In her discussion of that fight, she stated: "Stuart said John kicked him in the head, and I'm convinced that kick was what eventually led to Stuart's death." Unsurprisingly, her book caused something of a flurry among Beatles fans, and in 2003 she denied making a direct link between the events. Historians tend to stay out of this. The only other person present before and after the fight was apparently Paul McCartney, and he didn't like Backbeat much for other reasons: "One of my annoyances about the film Backbeat is that they've actually taken my rock'n'rollness off me," he complained. "They give John the song Long Tall Sally to sing and he never sang it in his life. But now it's set in cement." Poor Paul McCartney, forever being rendered uncool by Beatles biopics. He didn't like Nowhere Boy either, because the actor playing him was too short.
Verdict
Backbeat is a historically plausible take on the relationships between John Lennon, Stuart Sutcliffe and Astrid Kirchherr, and a thoughtful, engaging film.
