As Ian MacDonald wrote in Revolution in the Head, one of the finer books about the band, there were “no passengers” in the Beatles. Both Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr are on hand in this never-dull doc to drive that basic principle home, with archival support from both John Lennon and George Harrison. Even the latter, typically the least rosy of the Fabs, confesses that he always felt bad for Elvis because there “was only one of him”. If there’s a message in Eight Days a Week, backwards or otherwise, it’s that the Beatles survived for as long as they did because they loved and protected each other.

Of course, in choosing to focus on the increasingly hairy (in all senses) touring years from 1963 to their penultimate show at San Francisco’s Candlestick Park in 1966, director Ron Howard can apply his lightweight sensibilities to the happy part of the story and avoid all the messy interpersonal stuff that happened after the band’s subsequent retirement from the stage. The mandate here is to guarantee a splendid time for all, and it’s achieved admirably, given that we already know the story a thousand times over.

New footage and restored concert clips certainly help, among them a ferocious version of “I Saw Her Standing There” from 1963 that reminds us that these guys could absolutely summon the darker powers of rock ’n’ roll and still look adorable. More astonishing still, perhaps, is black-and-white film of a sea of football fans singing “She Loves You” en masse at Liverpool’s Anfield stadium. This gives Elvis Costello the chance to talk about hometown pride, which in turn should remind us that the bonds forged in the working-class communities of postwar Britain were then carried into battle by the Beatles through three years of unfathomable mayhem. (It’s how they won the war.)

Besides Costello, whose presence makes sense here, Howard calls on a slightly weird array of Hollywood friends like Whoopi Goldberg to recall their own formative doses of Beatlemania. She tells the story of seeing the band at Shea Stadium—a pristine 4K restoration of that history-making concert actually accompanies the main feature—although that has to compete, mind-bogglingly, with an actual clip of teenage Sigourney Weaver screaming along to “Boys” at the Hollywood Bowl.

With his unwavering dedication to the positive, Howard also contrasts the “bigger than Jesus” shit storm with the band’s staunch, unanimous, and frankly dangerous refusal to play to segregated audiences in the American South. It’s as close as Eight Days a Week comes to deeper inquiry into the context of a phenomenon still without equal. (Speaking of which, composer Howard Goodall makes the not unacceptable argument that Lennon-McCartney were better than Mozart.) It also doesn’t matter. If the test is whether or not a Beatles obsessive approves, then Eight Days a Week gets two McCartney-shaped thumbs up. As the man himself says, clearly amused when asked about the Beatles and “culture” in an ancient interview: “Pfft, it’s not culture, it’s just a good laugh.”

Georgia Straight, September 2016