BACKBEAT
A film review by Lons Ponschock
Copyright 1995 Lons Ponschock
Directed by Iain Softley Stars Sheryl Lee, Stephen Dorff, and Ian Hart as John Lennon
Cover Band Soundtrack
Greg Dulli Terence Blanchard
Don Fleming David McMurray
Dave Grohl Eric Reed
Mike Mills Don Was
Thurston Moore Buster marbury
Dave Pirner Luis Conte
Mark Goldenberg
See that? 'Never put the band credits on one of these things before. That's it's importance.
BACKBEAT is about the early Beatles: the 1960 Beatles in Hamburg on the Reeperbahn: the red light district.
I never liked the Beatles ... at least the Ed Sullivan version of them. The music was over-played. It was a media phenomenon. It was the 60's version of the bobby soxers screaming for Sinatra 20 years before. It was hype. It's a bad memory for me, not a good one.
BUT there are no Fab Four tunes in BACKBEAT, nothing to jerk your chain about where you were in 1962 and what you'd be doing at Woodstock a few years later. No nostalgie du la boue or "reminiscence of the mud." What a relief.
BACKBEAT put me in mind of THE COMMITMENTS and SWING KIDS. This Is The Grunge Beatles; something to put you in mind of a more contemporary group. These days Nine Inch Nails or Nirvana would not play strip clubs on the Reeperbahn to start a career though. Perhaps there is a lesson in that too.
The music is Rhythm and Blues... and Lennon wearing his Buddy Holly "super glasses." All that. All the lowlife and fights, fights to be heard. And we hear the Lennon wit, as he storms around like Sid Vicious... Sid Vicious had no wit as I recall. And the Cockney accent. I thought of Ken Loach's film RIFF RAFF during this too. RIFF RAFF: that film with the Cockney cast and English subtitles. Ha!
* * * * *
"You made us look like Klaus."
Before the new look of the Beatles there was the energy that rock and roll and little blue pills could produce. And those little Blue Meanies produced a bunch of hard day's nights. Before YELLOW SUBMARINE and the Richard Lester films, there was Lennon, Stuart Sutcliffe, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Pete Best. And there was Astrid.
The story here as about Lennon, Sutcliffe and Astrid Kirchner, a German photographer. They want to play Lennon and Sutcliffe as intimates. To me it's insignificant that the legend might be "contaminated" with a homosexual influence--insignificant that Lennon and Sutcliffe had a relationship deeper than that which might be tolerated by the screaming girls at The Cave in Liverpool or at Shea Stadium in New York.
This is Sutcliffe's story too. Stuart Sutcliffe abandoned a painting career to play with the band. His career and reputation were more firmly established than that of his rock and roll friends.
"It's all dick."
-- from BACKBEAT --
We know that Sutcliffe was not a member of the Beatles when they hit America and Shea Stadium, so I don't think I'm giving anything away when I relate the following scene and it's effect on me:
We see Sutcliffe in the audience as the quartet version of the Beatles is playing--in the audience with this longing look on his face: the look I associate with an old cartoon which these days is still probably broadcast at 5 am some- where. It's a scene of a boy on crutches who is left behind as the hole in the mountain where the land of toys and candy is closing faster than he can keep up with. I think the cartoon was "The Pied Piper of Hamlin;" one of those cartoons you see at 5 am because of the partying from the night before: one of those 1940's cartoons drawn with a childlike and schizophrenic mania. The boy on crutches is left behind to tell the story of how the children disappeared to the townsfolk of Hamlin.
I am that boy.
* * * * *
BACKBEAT is a good film all the way around. Easily worth watching a couple of times for the subtlety of language and the music itself. It may be one of the best music biographies ever made. This is rock and roll. And the film history of it is pretty scant or left wanting. THE BUDDY HOLLY STORY should have been a lot better than it was ... should have been a lot less saccharine.
But here with the maturity of a European backdrop, the director Iain Softley has given us the 1960 pre-Carnaby Street Brit homage to the music which, like that of Buddy Holly, owes its soul to rhythm and blues. The Brit homage before the Brit invasion.
I liked BACKBEAT a lot.
BACKBEAT is available at most outlets.
-- lon
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