MOVIE REVIEW : A Light but Lively ‘60s ‘BackBeat’

Before the Beatles were Fab or Yellow Submarined or Maharishied, they were a scrounging group just like other mortal rockers. “BackBeat” deals with the pre-Ringo years of 1960 to mid-1962, when Pete Best was the drummer and Stu Sutcliffe, on and off, played bass guitar.

Focusing primarily on Sutcliffe, played by Stephen Dorff, and his knockabout friendship with Ian Hart’s John Lennon, “BackBeat” keeps fuzzing our memories of the Beatles with lots of unfamiliar shenanigans. The effect is both alienating and humanizing: They don’t seem to be our Beatles, and yet these early struggles bring them closer to us. They were people before they were pop icons.

Would “BackBeat” have the same resonance if it were about a fictitious rock band? It’s doubtful. The film plays off our knowledge--and ignorance--of the Beatles. It doesn’t go into any particular depth about the relationships between Sutcliffe and Lennon and the other Beatles; it gives a once-over-lightly view of the Liverpool and Hamburg concert scene in the early ‘60s, where most of the action takes place. Director and co-writer Iain Softley is mostly interested in getting across the lurching, frenetic atmosphere of those days, when rockers were trying out their Elvis and James Dean poses and Pop was just around the corner.

Despite its flash and bite, “BackBeat” is also a fairly conventional view of celebrity heartbreak. The goading, teasing subtext to this film is: Just imagine! Sutcliffe could have been a Beatle!

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Softley tries to have it both ways. He shows us how Sutcliffe, who died from a brain hemorrhage in 1962 after he had already fallen out with the Beatles, was actually a talented painter who found fulfillment with Astrid Kirchherr (Sheryl Lee), the Hamburg photographer whose photographs of the group helped fix their “look.” (The haircuts were her idea.)

But Softley also plays up the sad sack side of Sutcliffe’s story. He coulda been a contenda. The doom and gloom doesn’t really jibe with what we’re shown of his life with the Beatles (or, even more, with what’s been documented about that period). After all, Sutcliffe, as the film shows, could hardly play the bass or sing; he joined the group as a lark, and, as he tranced into the Hamburg underground of unisex pop poseurs, he lost interest in taking the stage. Even if Sutcliffe hadn’t lost interest, Paul McCartney (played in the film by Gary Bakewell) wanted him gone, and even Lennon, who threatened to leave if Stu were dropped, finally backed down. The heartbreak scenario that Softley twangs in “BackBeat” is misguided. If Sutcliffe had stayed with the Beatles, they would not have been the Beatles.

The film also takes Sutcliffe a bit too mythically. Dorff has the right bantamweight James Dean look--it’s the look that smote Astrid at first sight--but he doesn’t get behind the look. Sutcliffe was a paradox: He tried on rebellions as a pose--he rebelled against his middle-class home, his art training, his rock career. And yet, as a painter, he was the real thing, even though the movie conveys his artistry in the standard bio-pic way. He attacks his canvases with a Van Gogh-like ravenousness.

Sutcliffe is the film’s center but he’s a centerless character. He takes on the colorations of the surrounding scenery. When Astrid, along with her long-term friend and lover Klaus Voormann (Kai Weisinger), dresses him up in modish existential duds, he seems most alive. He strikes attitudes, and that’s probably part of what attracted Lennon to him; Lennon was trying on attitudes too in those days (and later too).

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The unspoken sexual tension between Sutcliffe and Lennon is also lightly underlined in “BackBeat.” It’s supposed to be the mirror image of Sutcliffe’s love affair with Astrid but it has more passion than anything going on with his fraulein . Ian Hart, who also played Lennon in “The Hours and the Times,” is phenomenal in the role; he almost makes Lennon’s grasping, desperate, overbearing relationship with Sutcliffe come alive.

Hart’s Lennon is so volatile and self-hating and self-infatuated that he seems to be having a wild carnal affair with himself. It’s a lot more exciting than the confabs between Sutcliffe and Astrid, which should be creepier than they appear here. Astrid, in her photos, was a zonked pixie, and she merged her look with Sutcliffe’s as they grew closer together. Their love had the element of a twinship fantasy.

Most movies about rock are such dithery jobs that “BackBeat” may seem more impressive than it really is. It’s lively and full of good music and it plays around with a fascinating subject--the Fifth Beatle and his one true love. But it doesn’t really illuminate that subject or those years or that music. It’s a Pop treatment of Pop.

* MPAA rating: R, for strong language and sexuality . Times guidelines: It includes obscenities, nudity, sexual episodes and a brutal beating scene.

‘BackBeat’

Stephen Dorff: Stuart Sutcliffe

Sheryl Lee: Astrid Kirchherr

Ian Hart: John Lennon

Gary Bakewell: Paul McCartney

A Gramercy Pictures release. Director Iain Softley. Producers Stephen Woolley, Finola Dwyer. Executive producer Nik Powell. Screenplay by Iain Softley, Stephen Ward, Michael Thomas. Cinematographer Ian Wilson. Editor Martin Walsh. Costumes Sheena Napier. Music Producer Don Was. Production design Joseph Barrett. Running time: 1 hour, 49 minutes.

* Playing at selected theaters.

* THE ‘BACKBEATLES’?

There’s no mistaking the band, but references in the film are purposefully oblique. F13