Yesterday review: Go for the nostalgia, stay because you already paid for a ticket

My mom is a huge Beatles fan. She is in town this week, so when I got an email inviting me to Mission Valley to see a screener of Danny Boyle’s new film Yesterday, it was a no brainer that she was coming with me.

For those who haven’t seen a trailer or read a synopsis, Yesterday is about a struggling guitarist named Jack Malik (British actor Himesh Patel). He plays his guitar all over his English hometown of Suffolk. Only his friends come to see him and only his manager, Ellie (Downton Abbey and Cinderella star Lilly James), actually likes his music. One day he wakes up to realize he is the only person on Earth that remembers the Beatles. He does what any enterprising but struggling musician would and starts passing their songs off as his own.

My mother and I agreed that the trailer was cute, but the premise was very high concept. This was either going to be a wonderful film or genuinely awful. It was hard to imagine anything in between.

I’ll get to a full review and recap in a moment, but my mom and I were wrong. Not only was it somewhere in between, but we couldn’t agree on how good Yesterday actually is. She thought it was silly, but for the most part a cute, fun little love story. I thought it was fine for the first hour and then just kind of fell apart.

So I already gave you the broad strokes of Yesterday. Here are a few more details. Jack works at the British version of a Sam’s Club.

This was the moment that I learned discount club shopping exists outside of North America. The parking lot of the place is always covered in seagulls. This is when I learned those exist outside of North America too.

One night, after swearing that he was done struggling as a musician, Jack gets out of Ellie’s car and decides to be sad and bike home in the rain. While on that bike ride, the power all over the world goes out. This somehow also causes the lights on cars to go out, and Jack gets hit by a bus.

After a lengthy recovery, Ellie comes to take Jack home from the hospital. She and their other friends buy Jack a new guitar to replace the one the bus that was apparently connected to the world power grid destroyed.

He thanks them by playing a few bars of the Beatles’ Yesterday. No one has ever heard the song and just assumes it is something that Jack had written before the accident.

More and more evidence mounts that, I don’t know, the worldwide blackout was the Beatles disappearing from history or something maybe? Anyway, Jack recognizes this as a golden opportunity to become a beloved and renowned songwriter.

He ends up on a local TV show that somehow Ed Sheeran sees because Ed Sheeran sees all at all times in England. Ed likes this “new song” Jack plays called “In My Life” and invites Jack out on tour.

That’s where Jack meets people like Debra Hammer (SNL’s Kate McKinnon), Ed’s manager who turns Jack into the most desired and promising unsigned talent in the music industry.

There’s also the through line of Ellie being in love with Jack and Jack unknowingly rejecting her over and over again. From here, you get where all this goes.

Alright, so the dialogue isn’t great and, storywise, there are some really problematic moments, like Jack supposedly being this huge Beatles fan but he can’t remember any of their lyrics. It’s goofy and maybe a little dumb, but it isn’t where the movie actually lost me.

There is a moment after Jack uploads some performance videos to the internet and, for some reason, we see him walking inside a phone to watch the likes, clicks and shares climb. That is where this thing kinda falls apart. After that moment, it is almost as if director Danny Boyle realized there was a checklist of things he had to do in order to bring the story home.

I also had a real problem with Jack and Ellie’s love story. I wouldn’t say he is ever outright horrible to her, but he clearly doesn’t care about her the same way she cares about him. That is until Jack realizes there is a chance to have sex with Ellie. Then, the fact that roles are reversed and she won’t keep hurting herself by loving someone who doesn’t love her back becomes a real problem for Jack. It doesn’t really feel like his pain has earned our empathy.

There was something else about Yesterday that didn’t work for me, and I encourage you to get in on this question in the comments. Would Beatles’ songs even be the kind of hits they were in the 1960s today? That is not a shot at their quality at all. I love the Beatles. They were the soundtrack of my childhood even in the 80s and 90s since, as I mentioned before, my mother loves the Beatles so much.

In 2019, though, we’re dealing with a world where rock is dwindling in popularity, Lady Gaga is considered a master songwriter and the audience for every form of entertainment is more subdivided than ever. So, with all of those mountains to climb, could even some of the best songs ever written impact the culture the way they did in the 60s?

I say no, and if that is true, the climax of Yesterday shouldn’t be Jack Malik playing to a sold out Wembly Stadium, it should be him getting Ariana Grande to retweet his Soundcloud link and maybe 30 people showing up to his concert at a bar that evening.