PROVOKR Pick: Yesterday

BY: Amanda Jane Stern

Everyone knows The Beatles right? Everyone surely has at least one friend with a record player and an almost complete collection of Beatles albums? Their impact on not only music, but culture has been immeasurable, but what if The Beatles somehow disappeared from our collective memories and only one person were able to remember them. What then? That is exactly the premise of Danny Boyle’s newest movie, Yesterday.

Yesterday is a British musical-fantasy-comedy that follows Jack Malik, an aspiring singer-songwriter⁠—strong emphasis on the aspiring—who wakes up one morning, after a world-wide power outage, to a world where nobody, except him, remembers The Beatles.

Jack, using this as his chance to get his career going, begins to perform the songs of The Beatles as if they are his own. Along the way he acquires an American agent who helps catapult him to the most famous musician who ever was. As his star power climbs, his relationship with his always-there best friend threatens to deteriorate.

The premise of this film definitely lends itself to some interesting questions. What would be different about a world in which The Beatles never existed? Without them to make their mark on our culture and history, what other bands took that spot? How did the absence of their music during the Vietnam war affect the Hippie movement? With which band did The Rolling Stones feud?

Yesterday was written by Richard Curtis and directed by Danny Boyle. It stars Himesh Patel as Jack Malik, Lily James as his supportive best friend and maybe love interest, Ellie, and Kate McKinnon as his shrewd, American agent, Debra.

Yesterday comes out in theaters on June 29, 2019.