Now Streaming: The Beatles - Get Back

Peter Jackson’s The Beatles – Get Back, is a tour de force of archival filmmaking. Over the course of nearly eight hours of screen time, Jackson teases out multiple story arcs from 60 hours of source material, originally shot in 1969 by a film crew under the direction of Michael Lindsay-Hogg for use in the documentary Let it Be. Despite a 50-year interval, there’s a rawness and immediacy to the scenes of the band playing together, and with less than a month to produce an album of brand-new songs, the prodigious songwriting talents of each band member are on full display. Creative tensions between Paul McCartney and George Harrison mount throughout episode one, culminating in Harrison’s brief departure from the band. Paul noodles out the first few notes of Get Back one morning, seemingly out of nowhere, and we watch as the song develops over the course of the film into the first single released from the album.

McCartney is the dominant personality in the group, and while he clearly wants to hold the band together, it’s partly his drive and personality that’s pushing it apart. But despite the tensions, hurt feelings and disagreements, their work ethic, focus and creative process remain front and center throughout the film. When called upon to deliver, for whatever reason, an album of new songs in three weeks, they buckle down and do it. And watching it happen is nothing short of magical.