The movie Yesterday has a great premise. And a great trailer about that premise.

In case you missed it (and don’t want to watch it now), said premise is that after a mysterious, world-wide blackout, the entire world has forgotten that The Beatles ever existed. Save one guy. This guy–Jack Malik, a failed singer-songwriter–capitalizes on this anomaly to ignite his career by singing Beatles songs, claiming they are his own.

Even though I know–I know–that great trailers can be made for really poor films, I liked this one so much I made a point to go see this movie on opening weekend.

And… Maybe it’s not quite as great as the trailer? But it was still a very enjoyable, funny, fun, romantic movie.

Romantic? Yes, at heart it’s a romantic comedy about Jack and his manager, Ellie. Ellie has been carrying a torch for Jack for years; Jack has somehow failed to notice. Now she’s letting him know. But his increasing fame is, as one can imagine, nothing but a complication.

It actually fits in well with the story of him trying to build a singing career on singing Beatles tunes, given that they wrote so many love songs. And that part of the movie–Jack introducing the world to The Beatles canon–is as fun as you’d hope. (“Interesting you called it the USSR [re “Back in the USSR”]. Russia hasn’t been called that since before you were born.”) I especially liked the detail that Jack keeps munging up the lyrics. He knows the songs–of course he knows the songs, we all do–but he doesn’t necessarily deeply know the songs. He’s no Beatles guru, and he can’t look up the lyrics on Google. So he has to wrack his brain trying to remember them, and doesn’t always succeed. We get changed words here, reordered verses there, and a truly epic struggle to put “Eleanor Rigby” together.

Also good? While there is plenty of appreciation for The Beatles work (look, those are some catchy songs), it’s not instantaneous nor universal. Many of Jack’s early attempts to revive his career by singing their songs is met with a shrug.

I enjoyed the film’s twists, including the controversial one that I don’t want to spoil (but you, unlike Jack, can Google what that is). You can’t ponder the premise too deeply, of what the world would really be like had The Beatles never existed (no Oasis, sure, but who else…?), or what the nature of this “blackout” really is. You really just have to go with it. And thereby be rewarded with a film full of people that are great to spend time with.