"Yesterday," Danny Boyle's music-themed comedy about a struggling musician, Jack Malik, who wakes up to find that The Beatles have been erased from history, is one of those movies that will divide audiences into two kinds of people.
First, there are the casual music fans who will accept the premise as a fanciful delight. They'll enjoy the lively renditions of Beatles classics by Jack (a serviceable Himesh Patel) and savor the unspoken attraction between him and his scrappy manager, Ellie (Lily James). These viewers will get a kick out of seeing pop balladeer Ed Sheeran play himself (rather well, too) and Kate McKinnon as a calculating record executive who holds "the poison chalice of money and fame." It's a classic tale of pop stardom versus the girl you love, set to the greatest songs ever written _ what's not to like?
Then there are the amateur rock historians, like myself, who will begin grumbling as soon as The Beatles vanish in a Y2K-style power outage (set to the orchestral buildup of "A Day in the Life"). This kind of person will lean over and whisper that if The Beatles hadn't released "Rubber Soul" in 1965, then The Beach Boys wouldn't have responded with "Pet Sounds" (1966), which in turn inspired "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" (1967). Are we also wiping out The Who, The Kinks and just about every other band of the past 50-odd years? Even beyond music: Without The Beatles, what happens to long hair, hippie couture, Eastern mysticism, an entire counterculture?
