And yet the filmmakers convey that Epstein's sense of belonging was limited. He could never be truly himself, could never get over his self-loathing. His friend Geoffrey Ellis, the managing director of the Epstein business NEMS, says that Epstein both enjoyed gay sex and didn't want to be gay. Joe Flannery, a quiet, gentle man whose father made furniture for the Epstein shop, explains what he and Epstein were up against as young gays in Liverpool. In those days, he says, you were a queer, "but you know you're not queer in your head." Homosexuality was still illegal in Britain and they knew of gay men taken to the lunatic asylum outside of Liverpool. It was probably Epstein's self-loathing that led him to seek out rough trade. Flannery tells a horrifying story of Epstein's leaving the house one evening in a white shirt that, when he returned a few hours later, was "brilliant red."

Part of the release for Epstein was being accepted as a member of what someone in the film calls "the international set." It was a thrill for him to find himself in the company of Orson Welles as they both followed the bullfighting season in Spain. The irony, though, is that the glamour of the pop world Epstein created made the "showbiz" world he aspired to seem stodgy and dull -- even mummified -- by comparison. When we see newsreel footage here of Noel Coward attending some anonymous first night, he might as well be Archie Rice, the third-rate vaudevillian of John Osborne's "The Entertainer."

And yet the center of the excitement of the Beatles' world was not always a safe place to be. Early in the film we hear the guitar feedback from "Tomorrow Never Knows" over a montage that includes both footage of the Liverpool suburbs where Epstein grew up and images of cops wrestling Beatles fans to the ground. This is the distance Epstein and the Beatles would travel and it's a reversal of every trite image of shiny, happy Beatlemania -- what's waiting in the wings is chaos.

In a section on the group's hellish 1966 tour, the film shows just how close to chaos Epstein and "the boys" came. As the Beatles traveled the world, a right-wing group attempted to hatch an assassination plot against them in Japan; in the Philippines, a perceived slight to that glorified gangster's moll Imelda Marcos ended with thugs lining up to beat them on their way to their plane; and Americans gave in to the worst yahoo clichés of themselves following John Lennon's "bigger than Jesus" comment, burning Beatles' records in bonfires and having the KKK show up outside arenas where they played.

"The Brian Epstein Story"

Directed by Anthony Wall

Journalists often portray the Beatles' music as a refuge from the unrest of its time: the group's eruptive popularity of early 1964 as a reaction to JFK's assassination a few months earlier and so on. "The Brian Epstein Story" insists that the terror of the 1966 tour is part of the story, too. It's what explains the insularity of retreating to the studio (who would want to tour under such conditions?), and the insular -- if still brilliant -- tone of the records that followed: After "Sgt. Pepper's," with a few shining exceptions -- "Hey Jude" among them -- the Beatles' music no longer sounded as if it were reaching out to meet us but drawing us into a private, cryptic place. The film reminds us of the horrible irony of Beatlemania: Those swept up in it may have gained freedom, but the Beatles themselves did not.

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