Yesterday

It is a funny and heartfelt romantic comedy co-written by Richard Curtis and directed by Danny Boyle. Himesh Patel (in his feature debut) plays a rock guitarist on the point of giving up, getting ready to go back to teaching, despite the urging of his manager-roadie, Lily James, who has been in love with him since middle school, although he has never noticed. When she drops him off, he gets on his bike to pedal home, when suddenly the lights all over the world go out and he is struck by a bus. When he wakes, he discovers he is in a different world, where no one has ever heard of Coca-Cola or cigarettes.... or the Beatles. When he plays a Beatles song for his friends, they claim never to have heard of it before. He thinks they are joking, but as it dawns on him, he desperately writes all the Beatles songs, and is hailed as a great new talent, and taken under the agency of a Mephistophelean talent agent, played to glowering perfection by Kate McKinnon.

There are some wonderful sequences in this movie, and this is what Curtis excels at, like the incoherent buddy, played here by Joel Fry, who is utterly useless, and the assortment of friends. More than that, the recent spate of musicals about rock performers gives me some hope that we will see a revival of musicals, even if they are for the moment, of purely the diagetic variety.