BACKBEAT, retro biodrama from 1994, takes an unsentimental, persuasively gritty look back at the formative years of The Beatles, focusing on their 1960-62 strip club boot camp period in Germany, zeroing in on the friendship between John Lennon and Stuart Sutcliffe, the band’s original bass player, and Sutcliffe’s romance with German photographer and artist Astrid Kirchherr.

“We’re gonna be big Stu, we’re gonna be too big for Liverpool, we’re gonna be too big for Hamburg, we’re gonna be too big for our own bloody good.”

After playing together for a few years under a variety of name changes, a group of young British musicians calling their band The Beatles journey from rowdy Liverpool to the rowdier German port city Hamburg in the Summer of 1960, to play bookings at raunchy nightclubs in the city’s red-light district. Group founder John Lennon (Ian Hart) is joined by best friend Stu Sutcliffe (Stephen Dorff), Paul McCartney (Gary Bakewell), George Harrison (Chris O’Neill) and Pete Best (Scot Williams). Lennon and Sutcliffe were both twenty in 1960, McCartney, Harrison and Best were still teenagers. Astrid was twenty-two. Ringo Starr, who replaced Best in the Summer of ’62, gets just a quick mention in the timeline of the script. The venues are rough, hours are long, the sexual activity plentiful, amphetamines are in play and temperaments clash. When laid back Stu—who has more evident and untapped talent as an artist than as a wobbly bass player—meets beatnicky and connected photographer Astrid Kirchherr (Sheryl Lee) they click and his focus drifts away from the band and into her avant garde world, a move that jealous and volatile John has issues with.

ASTRID: “How can you be such an asshole?”  JOHN: “Practice.”

Hart, 28, is really good as the driven and touchy Lennon; one thing the movie doesn’t shy from is that while you might like listening to and watching John—‘the John’ we’d become familiar with as a performer—it’s also evident that being around him in real life wasn’t always a ton of fun. Dorff, 20, gives probably his career best performance as the ill-fated Stu, Miller and the rest are fine, the time & scene atmosphere is conveyed without prettifying it, and the raw jamming energy of the music is well expressed.

Shooting in Hamburg and London, Iain Softley (The Wings Of The Dove, K-PAX, The Skeleton Key) made his debut as director, and co-wrote the script with Michael Thomas (The Hunger, Ladyhawke, The Devil’s Double) and Stephen Ward. In England it grossed around $3,000,000. In the States/Canada the box office came to $2,394,000, the year’s 167th position.

With Kai Wiesinger (as artist/producer Klaus Voormann), Jennifer Ehle (as Cynthia Powell, John’s first wife), Wolf Kahler (as Bert Kaempfert and Paul Duckworth (as Ringo). 100 minutes.

* Astrid, Lennon’s son Julian, Pete Best and Sutcliffe’s sister liked it. Paul felt slighted over having the early rock standby “Long Tall Sally” done by Lennon in the film when it was McCartney who actually tackled it on stage, but he thought Dorff was “astonishing”. Ringo felt the movie did a fine job capturing the punkish style the group had on stage (more than a decade before ‘punk’ was a thing). Astrid passed away in 2020, at 81 having outlived Stu by 58 years.

Rock ‘n Roll is Here to Stay—Ian Hart had already played Lennon, in the fictional 1991 indie drama The Hours and Times. In 1994, on the heels of playing George Harrison, Chris O’Neill formed a successful tribute band, The Backbeat Beatles, still rockin’ in 2025.