Yesterday is not quite as good a film as it could have been, but it certainly does offer an amusing look at an alternate universe in which the Beatles don’t exist as we know them.  Interestingly enough, the absence of the Beatles is also connected in this movie with the absence of other cultural artifacts, namely Oasis and the Harry Potter universe.  The movie itself seems to present the absence of the Beatles as a crushing loss to those who remembered them–and given the high quality of the Beatles that is not an unreasonable feeling–but simultaneously the film undercuts this with the sense that the world is more or less the same without the Beatles as it would have been with them.  After all, we still have a cutthroat music industry keen on profiting from its artists and the world of the movie does not appear drastically different whether or not there is Beatles music, which somewhat undercuts the film’s argument for their cultural importance.  While you can’t miss what you never knew, if the Beatles were truly important on a cultural level than something would be different and worse in the culture without them.  This film somewhat fails to understand how to paint an alternate universe well enough to grasp what would be different without the Beatles.

The film’s plot is rather straightforward, given its alternative universe theme.  Himesh Patel plays a struggling singer-songwriter who works part-time jobs and is managed by a longtime friend and manager played by Lily James where both of them have a massive and longtime unrequited crush on each other.  A miraculous international electrical storm knocks out the world’s power for twelve seconds, allowing Jack Malik (Patel) to be hit by a bus and have two of his teeth knocked out and it also deprives the world of the music of the Beatles and those who were inspired by them (which does not include, apparently, Ed Sheeran, who plays himself here).  Jack finds himself gaining fame once he passes off Beatles’ songs as his own but finds his personal life suffering as a result, and rather predictably seeks to find ways of being honest as well as finding success in his love life, all of which is advice given to him by a peaceful if somewhat isolated John Lennon who has survived in this alternate universe the film has constructed, even if he is an obscure person and not a famous one at all.

This particular movie is only okay largely because it gets caught in the midst of several contradictions.  For one, as previously noted, the movie shows that the loss of the Beatles, Oasis, and Harry Potter has no real effect on the world despite the fact that the movie attempts to urge in its dialogue a huge importance for recovering the music of the Beatles.  The other contradiction is that this movie seems to indicate that being famous and creative tends to wreck havoc on the personal life of creative people even as it serves as the creative effort of at least some creative people and seeks to promote the creativity of still others (like the Beatles, and even Ed Sheeran).  Why is it so difficult for creative efforts to praise creativity and not equate it with a disastrous personal life?  And also, why is coherence such a difficult thing to maintain?  Is this film’s contradictory approach intentional or not?  These are not easy things to address, I know, but all the same one could think that with such an obvious hook for a story that the writers of the film would have been able to craft a work that did not collapse under its own contradictions.