In 1963 in Britain, and in 1964 in the rest of the world, the Beatles, to borrow a phrase from Greil Marcus, drew a line in the sand and allowed every willing soul to cross. Whether you crossed the line because of the sound of "She Loves You," or the joy of watching "A Hard Day's Night," or the look of the band, or the charisma and quick wit of their press conferences, or waited to succumb until the psychedelic dazzle of "Sgt. Pepper's," loving the Beatles wasn't merely a matter of loving their music. Loving the Beatles meant saying yes to a vision of life where the foundations of love, work, friendship all took on the quality of play. This was not a shallow, butterflies-and-flowers version of life -- not, for example, what Donovan would sing about with such enjoyable dippiness in "Wear Your Love Like Heaven."

If, as the misperception persists, pop music is about escape, then how do you explain the existence of a pop song called "We Can Work It Out"? What place does the concept of work even have in pop music? But the promise of the song -- and by extension all of the Beatles' music -- was that the work would in the end be worth something, that the work would not diminish the joy. The vision of happiness the Beatles offered never seemed false, even in "darker" songs like "In My Life" and "Strawberry Fields Forever." The moods of those songs -- regret and loss -- were, rather, a further confirmation of the band's joyous vision, simply because to understand the emotions of regret and loss depended on knowing what joy was.

It's tempting to see some of the last Beatles songs -- "The Long and Winding Road," "Carry That Weight" -- as preparing us for the dissolution of the community the group had brought together. These are songs where journeys have no foreseeable end, where the certainty of work ("Boy/ you're gonna carry that weight/ carry that weight a long time") holds no concomitant guarantee of pleasure. These are songs about fending for yourself, and despite the honor the songs saw in the prospect, it was a cruel development given the camaraderie that the Beatles had always embodied, always promised.

From utopia to exile in six or seven years is a bruising journey, and "The Brian Epstein Story" understands that Epstein traversed it faster and more intensely than any Beatles fan. Or, rather, that he traversed it as the ultimate Beatles fan, the one who was closest to the center of the story and yet not one of the charmed four, insider yet outsider.

"The Brian Epstein Story"

Directed by Anthony Wall

This is the territory the film stakes out as its own. The movie focuses on what it meant for Epstein to be an outsider, not just as a gay Jew growing up in the '50s in northwestern England, but as a budding sophisticate in the provinces, an "artistic" type in a family of retailers, and a mannered, quiet aesthete who finds himself in the midst of a pop phenomenon.

Implicit in the movie's approach is an acceptance of the liberating power of a true pop phenomenon. To Wall, there is no contradiction in the notion that people can feel themselves a part of a wildly popular movement without sacrificing their singularity or individuality. "The Brian Epstein Story" understands that the people swept up by the Beatles -- as were those swept up by Elvis and, later, punk -- were not simply acted on as fans but found the energy and inspiration to act for themselves. Certainly, Epstein did. Closeted though he was, this gay Jew found himself a place to belong in mid-'60s Britain.

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