But it never really devolves into the full-bodied satire one might expect. “All perfectly normal, it merely means that these youngsters are enjoying themselves.” This pep talk opens the film, and establishes its absurdist tone. “I want you to be prepared for excessive screaming, hysteria, hyperventilation, fainting, fits, seizures, spasmodic convulsions, even attempted suicides,” Sullivan (Matt Jordan) tells his crew of ushers as they’re preparing for the show. Zemeckis spends the bulk of the film cross-cutting between their various exploits until their storylines reconvene, in somewhat miraculous fashion, for the climactic performance. Upon arriving in the city, they quickly split up, each pursuing their own particular quests. The friend group represents a sort of cross-section of Beatlemania: devoted fanatics, skeptics, and those somewhere in between are all accounted for here.
The film follows a pack of New Jersey teenagers who make a trek to New York City in the hopes of seeing the Beatles’ first American performance on The Ed Sullivan Show. It’s less concerned with representing the scale of the Beatles’ cultural influence, and more interested in the emotional weight on the level of individuals - a day in the life of a handful of Beatlemaniacs, so to speak. For a film whose subject is one of the most famous events in the history of American popular culture, Robert Zemeckis’ I Wanna Hold Your Hand is actually quite intimate.
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