“You follow the girls and you’ll find out where they are.”
This advice is offered by a young Beatles fan to a film crew about an hour into “Beatles ‘64,” the new Beatles documentary streaming now on Disney+. The band has just slipped out the back entrance of a building, and the fans are in hot pursuit.
It’s practical advice for the harried cameramen tasked with capturing this band on the run, but it also serves as the documentary’s thesis statement.
Produced by Martin Scorsese, “Beatles ‘64” captures – through a mixture of archival footage and newly filmed interviews – the Beatles’ first trip to America to perform on “The Ed Sullivan Show.” “Beatles ‘64” is really three stories told at once: the first is a portrait of a young band in the final moments before becoming the biggest act in the world, the second is about a nation still reeling from the death of its president finding a reason to twist and shout, and the third, and most important story, is about the girls that made the band a phenomenon.
Like the 2021 documentary series “Get Back,” “Beatles ‘64” uses rarely-seen archival footage of the Beatles to tell the band’s story. But while director Peter Jackson’s documentary set about the ambitious task of using its digitally upscaled and restored footage to rewrite the narrative on the tumultuous final days of The Beatles as a band, “Beatles ‘64” sets its sights on retelling a familiar story with sharper detail: boys meet America, and America falls in love.
In footage captured by documentarians Albert and David Maysles, we see the band in close quarters, joking with each other and the film crew, answering phone interviews, and listening to music in the lead-up to their now-legendary Ed Sullivan Show performance. Interspersed with this footage are interviews with heavy hitters who were in the room where it happened.
Paul McCartney guides us through his photos from his first trip to America, which are on display at the Brooklyn Museum, and Ringo Starr chats with Scorsese. Smokey Robinson discusses the creative dialogue between the Beatles and the Miracles, and director David Lynch describes seeing the band live in terms of a religious experience.
These interludes with famous talking heads are fun diversions, but the real stars and the documentary’s raison d'etre are the fans on the street, and more specifically, the girls.
Girls are the beating heart of “Beatles ‘64.” The Maysles capture as much footage of these fans as they do of the band, chronicling them as they share their tales of brief encounters with the Beatles (A girl who briefly held Paul’s hand seems on the verge of nirvana). They toy with the strait-laced men who are interviewing them and hatch schemes.
In one of the most memorable scenes of the documentary, a duo of girls has managed to sneak into the Beatles’ hallway in The Plaza hotel, only to be turned away within eyesight of the band’s door by a severely crew-cut security guard. These girls are confident, cool, and vocal in their love of the Beatles, speaking a language that unites them and which scares the older, square world (“I think the whole thing’s frightening and quite sick” reports one middle-aged onlooker in one of the funniest moments of the movie).
The film is at its best not when it's with the band looking out, but when it’s with the girls looking in, telling us in real time what the Beatles meant better than the band could in any of the stilted interviews they endure over the course of the documentary.
By the end of the decade, The Beatles would be the most lauded and critically respected band on the planet, but in this moment captured in “Beatles ‘64,” before that famous Ed Sullivan stint, it’s the girls alone on the frontlines. What “Beatles ‘64” realizes is that the story of the band in America is the story of the girls who got there first. Like Sinatra and Elvis before them, the girls pointed the way forward before the rest of the world wised up and took notice.
Like that fan near the hour mark, “Beatles ‘64” instructs viewers that if you want to find what matters, what music or star will shape the culture, you need to follow the girls.
