Jacob Fortune-Lloyd as Brian Epstein and Blake Richardson as Paul McCartney in Midas Man
It’s always a challenge to make a convincing movie about people famous enough that the average moviegoer will already be familiar with the real person’s look and speech and mannerisms. That makes it that much wilder that so many filmmakers have tried to retell the story of the Beatles, four of the most famous people ever to walk the earth. And yet they keep trying—heck, the Fab Four are about to have their own cinematic universe! That’s why I appreciated Midas Man right out of the gate: because it explores the well-worn Beatlemania story not from the perspective of the Beatles themselves, but rather from the perspective of their manager, Brian Epstein, who had a fascinating life story all his own.
We meet Epstein (Jacob Fortune-Lloyd) as a young man working for his father’s furniture company in Liverpool, where he has a side hustle stocking and selling popular records. Epstein has an ear for what will be the next big hit, and when he goes to the seedy Cavern Club to check a buzzy local band back from a stint in Hamburg, the Beatles, he is instantly blown away and decides then and there that he will be their manager, even though (1) they already have a manager, (2) he has never managed a band before, and (3) he’s barely older than the boys in the band are. Success seems unlikely and he has many doors slammed in his face, but through charisma, sheer force of will, and a steady diet of whiskey and amphetamines, he manages to hire the Beatles, take them to America, and make them the biggest band in the world.
As that last sentence hints at, though, there’s a lot more to Epstein’s story than just the Beatles. He has a contentious relationship with his parents (Eddie Marsan, Emily Watson)—dad can’t fathom why his son would want to leave behind comfort and success to risk it all for rock n’ roll, while mom is more supportive but genuinely worried. Epstein is a workaholic, too and a perfectionist—“I need things done my way,” he says at one point. “That way, they’ll be perfect.” He also carries a secret: Epstein is gay during an era when that could land you in jail, and his self-destructive nature causes him to chase after sexual release in ways that put him in real physical danger. He basically just never knows when to quit or when to slow down in any aspect of his life. Even though it seems like he’s riding on the same rocketship as the Beatles, their trajectory is ever-upward while his is filled with peaks and valleys.
Director Joe Stephenson does an excellent job of speeding through the events of Epstein’s life from just before Beatlemania to [spoilers for real world events that happened nearly 60 years ago] his untimely death at age 32. One of the ingenious moves Stephenson makes is to have Fortune-Lloyd break the fourth wall to address the viewer directly and catch us up to speed—it’s deployed sparingly at all the right moments to speed the story along, never as a crutch. Fortune-Lloyd’s performance makes the movie—he plays Epstein very much as a leading man out of a 1960s film, with the same prim and proper attitude, posh accent, and lightning-fast line delivery, but also with a more modern tact to capture the emotional turmoil below Epstein’s façade. The Fabs themselves (Jonah Lees, Blake Richardson, Leo Harvey-Elledge, Campbell Wallace, Adam Lawrence as John, Paul, George, and Ringo—and Pete Best, too) are some of the more convincing Beatle doppelgangers I’ve seen (particularly Lees and Richardson), partly because they’re used sparingly and partly because they really lean into specifically mimicking the way the foursome acted in their 1964 film A Hard Day’s Night. If there’s any frustration to be noted, it’s that Midas Man did not license the use of the Beatles’ music, and while it works in the early scenes where the film makes believable facsimiles of the Beatles’ covers of songs like “Money” and “Besame Mucho,” there’s a scene toward the end that really could have benefited from using a certain Beatles song instead of having to dance around it.
A minor quibble. Midas Man works more generally because unlike so many music biopics, it’s less about the music and more about the drive and determination and destructive demons in one man, captured by a singular, captivating performance. | Jason Green
Midas Man screens as part of the St. Louis Jewish Film Festival on Monday, April 7, at 3:00pm at B&B Theatres Creve Coeur West Olive 10 (12657 Olive Blvd.). Tickets are $16, or $5 with a full festival pass. To purchase tickets or to check out the full festival lineup, visit jccstl.com.
