** BACKBEAT
With Stephen Dorff, Sheryl Lee, Ian Hart, Gary Bakewell, Chris O’Neill, and Scot Williams.
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Iain Softley’s necrophilic semibiopic tinkers with the truth right away, setting up its hero as the archetypal doomed genius by opening with a Liverpool brawl in which Stu receives the head injury that eventually proves fatal. Official accounts say he sustained it much later, tumbling down a flight of stairs in Hamburg; much-reviled biographer Albert Goldman has theorized that he got it in a fight with Lennon himself. At any rate, Sutcliffe’s imminent death is clearly integral to the director’s sentimental vision of his character. Accordingly, the film and its copious press material make grandiose claims for Sutcliffe the artist–as if his death was poignant only in proportion to his wasted talent.
And there’s the rub: for all its Sutcliffe mythmaking, Backbeat is, in the end, about Lennon. Specifically (and less effectively than The Hours and Times), it’s about his latent gayness. The film goes to great lengths to portray the sexual overtones of the pair’s antagonistic friendship, apparently drawing on the perennial theory that competing over the same woman is a safe way of acting out sublimated homosexuality. It’s never entirely convincing in this respect, but it does offer detailed portraits of John and Stu and credible portrayals by Dorff and Hart. Unfortunately Backbeat provides only predictable thumbnail sketches of the other Beatles: Best as the stodgy one (he won’t do uppers or sport a Beatle ‘do), George as the mama’s boy (she sends him off to Hamburg with a parcel of home-baked scones), and Paul as the single-minded careerist (his desire to take over on bass speeds Stu’s ouster). The film’s portrayal of Astrid is equally uninsightful: she’s absurdly drawn as an all-knowing avant-garde aesthete who dazzles Stu by taking him to an art film and pierces John’s acerbic armor with astute psychological insights.
