Neglected Gem: Backbeat (1994)

From left: Scot Williams as Pete Best, Gary Bakewell as Paul McCartney, Ian Hart as John Lennon, and Chris O'Neill as George Harrison. (Photo: Channel Four Films.)

Backbeat covers a great period, 1960-62, when The Beatles, still teenagers and still unknown at home in England, played in cruddy Hamburg clubs (where the sailors used to ogle them) before the young avant-garde art crowd took them up. It’s about the friendship between John Lennon (Ian Hart) and Stu Sutcliffe (Stephen Dorff), an abstract expressionist painter he met at art school in Liverpool who dropped out to put together a band with John and travel to Germany; and about the uneasy, ambiguous triangle created when Sutcliffe fell in love with the German photographer Astrid Kirchherr (Sheryl Lee). The story is a fascinating one. But the film, directed by Iain Softley from a script he wrote with Michael Thomas and Stephen Ward, never caught on and has long been forgotten, though I love to teach it (my students always greet it enthusiastically) and, more than thirty years on, I think it deserves some attention.

Softley doesn’t treat The Beatles with reverence; he gets directly at their raw renegade energy, their sardonic bad behavior. John and Stu, badly overmatched, end up in a brawl with some toughs in a Liverpool club who takes offense when they mock the boring female vocalist (Marcelle Duprey). Their own performances with their band are full of smartass goofs on their audiences, and on other kinds of music – on anyone and anything they feel superior to. They’re mouthy kids – adolescents out for a thrilling adventure. George Harrison (Chris O’Neill) is only seventeen when they opt to try their luck in Hamburg; his mother brings food down to the ferry. (And eventually they’re kicked out of Germany when the immigration authorities cotton onto the fact that one of them is underage. They have to try again the next year.) Set loose in a strange country, Joh and Stu plunge into their new sensual freedom. In one scene Stu screws a girl on the top bunk in their crowded apartment, while below another girl goes down on John, who yells up to his buddy, “Well, Mr. Sutcliffe, how do you like Hamburg?” (Shy George waits outside with his date.) In another the club owner (Paul Humpoletz) shoves the exhausted boys onstage at one a.m., when they barely have the strength to pick up their instruments. So a young woman at the bar gives them speed to wake them up – another new sensation – and Softley cuts, hilariously, to them rocking it up like possessed maniacs, pop-eyed and frenetic. These scenes have some of the purely enjoyable sensory-overload humor Rick Ridgeway provides in his novel Three Squirt Dog, whose hero, high on his own adrenalin, is roughly the same age as John and Stu. The photographer Ian Wilson, shooting the Hamburg club scene in gleaming, misted-over electric color – neon cutting through fog – suggests how exotic the city must have seemed to these Liverpool natives. The expressionist look Wilson and production designer Joseph Bennett achieve is as distinctive as the stark black-and-white contrasts the great German directors and cinematographers gave to the films of the Weimar era.

Softley doesn’t have the actors lip-sync to the early Beatles studio albums many of us know backwards. The music is supplied by a pick-up band, assembled by Don Was, consisting of some of the most vibrant alternative musicians in mid-nineties rock and roll: Don Fleming of Gumball, Dave Grohl of Nirvana, Mike Mills of REM, Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth, Dave Pirner of Soul Asylum (singing for Gary Bakewell as Paul McCartney), and, dubbing for Ian Hart’s Lennon, the blistering vocalist Greg Dulli of the Afghan Whigs. Softley’s wise enough to recognize that these young men are his era’s equivalent of what The Beatles were for the early and mid-sixties, gifted punks with verve and guts and no interest in holding anything back. If you saw the Backbeat band perform “Money” and “Long Tall Sally” and “Helter Skelter” on the MTV Movie Awards after the movie’s release, you might have thought you’d been transported back to the beginnings of rock and roll. Softley has the key: he understands that every year fearless and talented young musicians were taking rock back to its roots, rediscovering its essence, just as The Beatles had in the early sixties.

The Lennon-Sutcliffe friendship is the backbeat the movie focuses on, the background out of which The Beatles come into being. In his own view, John rescues Stu from art school (which he himself has already fled); the band and Germany are to be the reckless escapade their camaraderie has promised. John is intensely loyal to Stu. Stu’s musicianship isn’t on the same level as that of John, George, Paul or Ringo Starr’s predecessor Pete Best (Scot Williams, who does a humorous riff on Best’s sullenness), and his moodiness and the tentativeness of his commitment make his performances erratic, sometimes baffling (as when he kills the rocking mood to perform a rendition of Elvis Presley’s “Love Me Tender” whose tone is indecipherable) and sometimes infuriating. Yet John continually defends him when Paul, the most career-minded of the group, complains that Stu’s dragging them down. It’s clear that in John’s mind his career and Stu are inseparable. So he forces the music on Stu, and he forces Stu on the others, more than once threatening to leave the band if they try to get rid of his friend.

Sweet-faced Stu (Dorff gives a very affecting performance), whose thick, upbrushed hair and sideburns and shades both pay tribute to and parody Presley, and the sardonic cut-up John are an odd couple; the only elements that appear to bind them are their affection for each other and their youthful greed for new sexual experiences. (John doesn’t think twice about cheating on his Liverpool girlfriend Cynthia, who would be his first wife, played by Jennifer Ehle.) And they get a kick out of bantering together like music-hall comics. But Lennon has other fervors, other hungers; his tart style masks an ambitious streak that runs as deep as McCartney’s, and it also covers the insecurity of a poor working-class kid from Liverpool who can never stop feeling he’s out of his league with young people who grew up with privilege. Ian Hart had played Lennon once before, in The Hours and Times, and his portrayal in Backbeat is so prodigious – acute, funny, explosive, biting – that you can believe he’d been camping inside this character.

Sheryl Lee as Astrid Kirchherr. (Photo: Channel Four Films.)

At first the band is too oddball, too foreign to mean much to the hard-drinking Hamburg clubbers on the Reeperbahn: John’s jokes fall flat, and they don’t get his caustic-ironic tone. The boys have wonderful energy when they play “Good Golly, Miss Molly,” but it takes their audience a while to warm up to their music. They do, though. The club is unbelievably seedy; they even have to share the stage with a nude dancer. Then Sheryl Lee’s Astrid enters, escorted by her boyfriend, Klaus Voorman (Kai Wiesinger), and she gets them right away. (So did Klaus: he heard them perform and then came back to show them to Astrid. Voorman later designed album covers for the band.) And her wide eyes, her golden halo of hair and her bedazzled smile knock Stu silly. This scene is a double cliché: a romantic thunderbolt encounter and, from the realm of pop bios, the moment when the freshness and power of the music have an altering effect on an audience or even just a single listener, whose response mirrors what we feel ourselves. Softley and Lee pump so much emotional conviction underneath these clichés that – though you might laugh at yourself for succumbing so easily – you’re swept up. Lee, Laura Palmer in Twin Peaks, is a magical actress. In the Twin Peaks movie prequel, Fire Walk with Me, she broke new ground in the role of the incest victim driven off the rails by what’s happening to her. But the movie, a fascinating failure with some knockout scenes, was treated with scorn (it was the backlash awaiting David Lynch after his victory at Cannes with a really terrible picture, Wild at Heart). And no one took any notice of Lee’s terrifying kamikaze performance. She was ignored again in Backbeat, but I’ve never seen anything like her Astrid.

Astrid looks like a model; she floats through a room, seemingly without making physical contact with the floor. But her aura of distanced chic circles a core of warmth, compassion, excitement. Lee, who is American, gets the essence of Astrid’s Germanness – that careful, slightly withdrawn quality – while revealing the capacity for feeling behind it. She brings Astrid’s taste for Cocteau, Rimbaud, Edith Piaf so much out of herself that they don’t seem like affectations. And she turns Stu on to her artistic passions. When she brings him to her apartment, where he’s startled by the frank eroticism of her photographs and he begins to kiss her neck, she moves from surprise to contemplation (a “this is new” reaction) to hesitation (she’s seeing someone else) to an abrupt plunge into sexual abandon. She’s turned away from him, burrowed inside herself; then she whirls around and whips off her sweater in a single movie, her eyes suddenly aflame. Lee’s eyes are as expressive as those of any movie actress from this film epoch. Has anyone before her ever been able to convey different emotions in both eyes at the same time? (Maybe one or two of the silent-movie vamps could manage it.)

If Lee’s performance didn’t work so brilliantly, the movie couldn’t. It’s Astrid’s weird, magic-carpet charisma that draws Stu back into the art world John hauled him out of, and we have to see it happen. John, of course, is livid about the effect she has on his best friend. Softley and his co-writers keep John’s motivation ambiguous; they hint at the possibility that John wants Astrid for himself, and also at the possibility that John’s relationship with Stu is crypto-homosexual, but they don’t underestimate Lennon’s angry-young-man anti-art stance as a factor. Lennon liked to flaunt his working-class origins and give the finger to anything he saw as pretentious, but he was a very conscious artist. (Remember In His Own Write – not to mention “I Am the Walrus”?) Even in these early club days his act was so self-aware and wised-up that he could hardly have been surprised when the Hamburg intellectuals gathered at the band’s feet, even while he made a show of disdaining them. Hart’s John gets drunk and gives a speech proclaiming that all art is “dick”; his bad-boy conduct is a performance, though – as in all Lennon performances – real anger and pain are swirling around inside it, like a dog chasing its own tail. And though he keeps protesting that what he does isn’t art, it’s pop, he succeeds in imbuing pop with the genius of an authentic artist.

The script contains a few trite exchanges, like one between Astrid and Cynthia, and it doesn’t always build enough toward the big speeches, so occasionally the rhythm lurches. But the speeches themselves are worth getting to, and Softley’s work with the actors, with the period evocations and with the musical numbers is remarkably sure and accomplished. It was his first feature, and three years later he directed an even better movie, an adaptation of Henry James’s The Wings of the Dove, yet he didn’t get the career he deserves. Backbeat brings us so close to the three main characters that the more Softley and the actors intensify the conflicts emerging from their unresolvable feelings for and expectations of each other, the more the film tears us apart. When Stu finally pulls out of the band, John warns him it’s a decision he’ll regret – that people will say, “There goes Stu Sutcliffe. He could have been in The Beatles.” The scene that follows is a club date where the boys perform “Please Mr. Postman” while Stu and Astrid sit at a table, merely part of the audience. Then Stu gets up and wends his way to the front of the crowd, so John can sing right to him. It’s a public venue but a private moment, a reminder of one bond that can’t be severed while at the same time it’s a recognition of another bond that has been. Softley, Hart and Dorff make us feel both that closeness and that distance. A few scenes later, when Stu Sutcliffe’s life comes to its shocking end, that tribute from one friend to another plays over again in your head. (Softley restages it, touchingly, with Astrid standing in for the absent Stu.) Backbeat is all about the paths we can’t help taking away from our youthful selves, and about the losses we never get over. And perhaps especially for those of us for whom The Beatles are synonymous with our own youth, its pungency can dog us for days afterwards like the images from a dream that hurt badly but that we never really wanted to wake up from.

– Steve Vineberg is Distinguished Professor of the Arts and Humanities at College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, where he teaches theatre and film. He also writes for The Threepenny Review and is the author of three books: Method Actors: Three Generations of an American Acting Style; No Surprises, Please: Movies in the Reagan Decade; and High Comedy in American Movies.