Yesterday

Jack Malik (Himesh Patel) works in a warehouse and lives with his parents.  He's also a struggling singer/songwriter, busking, playing the odd pub gig, driven on by the support of his manager/roadie/best friend Ellie (Lily James), but realising his 'career' is non existent.

When the entire planet suffers a 12 second blackout Jack is hit by a bus and blacks out.  When he wakes up in hospital he begins to realise that the world has changed, but he hasn't.  Nobody knows who The Beatles were.  They never existed, and Googling their name only turns up insects.  When he plays Yesterday to his friends they are stunned into silence at the beauty of this new song, so much better than the stuff he's been writing for years.

What happens when you're the only one in the world who can remember those songs, and you can sing and play too?  You become a major star, although it helps to find yourself being discovered by Ed Sheeran (playing himself) and thence suddenly propelled into becoming a major league recording artist.  And you, of course, question your values, your links to the people who were the mainstay of your old life, and realise you were in love with Ellie all along...

A Richard Curtis script and Danny Boyle direction raises expectations, which Yesterday crashingly fails to meet.  As a RomCom the rom bit's done fairly well, and Patel and james make a convincingly awkward couple.  But Curtis seems to have forgotten the com bit, and there's few laughs spread thinly through the unconvincing dialogue.  I counted far more missed opportunities.

It's saved in part by Patel's performance, making the most of what he's given.  Fortunately he's a decent singer and musician as well as actor, and his interpretations of these sixties classics stand up well.  The real stars of the movie are the songs, a reminder that The Beatles were perhaps the greatest songwriting band ever, and that shines through whoever plays them.  And Patel has a better voice than McCartney.They are songs made for cover versions.

James is good too, there's a nice touch having real life couple Sanjeev Bhaskar and Meera Syal as Jack's so-suburban parents, short but interesting cameos from Sarah Lancashire and the wonderful Robert Carlyle, and even Sheeran is better on camera than you might expect.

But the performances deserve better that the words they were given.  Without the songs this would be yet another totally predictable play-it-by-numbers fluffy romance, short on laughs or interest.  Something tells me there won't ever be a remake featuring the ginger one's material...