Drama about the early years of the Beatles, focusing on the friendship between John Lennon and Stu Sutcliffe. It’s more or less a Sutcliffe biopic.
Backbeat is not a great movie, but I enjoyed it immensely. You may like it as well. If you’re a big Beatles fan, this film offers a pretty solid overview of what their lives were like in the pre-fame period in Liverpool and Hamburg. Although you won’t get to hear any of the great original hits that made the Beatles what they would become, you’ll get to hear plenty of vintage 1950’s American rock-n-roll, which is what the Fab Five (Harrison, Lennon, McCartney, Best, Sutcliffe) played in those days. They played that music well.
There are other positives:
* The guy who plays John Lennon delivers an intense and excellent performance.
* There is plenty of sexy nudity. I have never seen Sheryl Lee look better.
* The movie is consistently well filmed and well acted.
If you believe the legend, Stu Sutcliffe was facing a future of unimaginable promise. He had the choice of being the best-looking member of the most successful rock group in history, or becoming the greatest modern painter since Picasso. Instead of being able to live out either of those dreams, he became a mere footnote in Beatles history when his brain exploded in a massive cerebral hemorrhage, and he died in a tiny studio in Hamburg.
For many celebrities, death was an excellent career choice:
For Elvis, dying saved him from being a fat guy singing crappy lounge songs in spangled jumpsuits. That awful image was expunged by his demise, and he was able to go back to being the handsome, hard-drivin’ rockabilly star that he had once been, and to remain so forever.
For Jim Morrison, death served the same purpose as Caligula’s self-deification. By dying, Jim raised himself far above the Monkees and the Turtles and the Dave Clark Five and the rest of the Doors, and made himself part of the Holy Trinity of Rock with Jimi and Janis. Mention one of the Three Martyred J’s, and you mention all three: Jimi, Janis, and Jim.
Stu Sutcliffe was not among the celebs who benefited from death. His death represented the loss of an exceptional life at the tragically young age of 21.
Johnny Moronic’s collages and HD videos can be found here. (Scroll down from the Twin Peaks section.)
Sheryl Lee’s nudography is here.
Was Sutcliffe really that well-respected as a painter or is that just taking some license in projecting one possibility?
We all love stories of unrealized potential. Was Pete Reiser the greatest ball player of the 1940s? Who knows? Youthful potential isn’t always fulfilled. If Fred Lynn had died after his rookie year, some people would be saying he was the greatest player of all time. But he lived. And he wasn’t.
Sutcliffe was considered to have great potential, but was never recognized as a true prodigy. Many experts have opined that he would have become a major artist had he lived longer, but his art teachers never singled him out. Their comments were always something like “one of my best students.”
So … who knows?
I have no opinion on his work because I can’t tell a great abstract impressionist from a bad one, but I think it’s more a case of “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”
GOTTA dig Sheryl Lee.
Also, a great soundtrack. They pretty obviously created the sound of the Hamburg Beatles by taking a group of 90s rockers, throwing them together, feeding them a bunch of speed (y’know, for the authenticity) then having them record a bunch of American classics until their voices were nearly shot.
A few years before this was another interesting film about The Beatles called The Hours and the Times.
It’s debatable that it was ever really the Fab Five in that Sutcliffe’s job, as told to him in the film by John Lennon, was to stand in the center of the stage, look pretty for all the girls and pretend to play guitar.
Lennon was a mass of contradictions, and, in some ways, he was at least partly responsible for Sutcliffe’s death. Elvis Costello expressed the other main contradiction of Lennon in his song The Other Side of Summer “was it a millionaire who said ‘imagine no possessions”?
I thought this was a really good film as many dramatic films about the Beatles never clicked with me. Ian Hart is great as John Lennon as he would later play him in a short set in an alternate timeline in which he quits the Beatles after recording “How Do You Do It?” where it is set in 1991 where Lennon is a bitter old man. My only qualm about the short is the music that is played as many of which would not exist if it weren’t for the Beatles.
I wish Stephen Dorff is given a bigger career as he was seriously overlooked for “Somewhere” by Sofia Coppola as that should’ve given him a bigger comeback. Instead, he did “Bucky Larson: Born to Be a Star”. Why?
Hart also played Lennon in 1991’s The Hours and Times which led to his casting in Backbeat. Something that struck me was his age vs Lennon’s. In The Hours, he was 27, playing a 23 yo Lennon. In Backbeat, he was 30, playing a 20-22 yo Lennon. Also interesting that Hart’s birthday falls on 8 Oct and Lennon’s on 9 Oct.
Sheryl Lee had an incredible run of nudity in the 90s, & never got credit for being an great actress in Fire Walk With Me
The term “underrated” has become a cliche, but it truly applies to her.