TThe Beatles’ breakup of America – that mythical, ecstatic moment that restored Britain’s post-war pride and became an enduring cornerstone of our soft power self-esteem – is the subject of this riveting documentary from director David Tedeschi; Martin Scorsese is a producer and interviews Ringo himself these days, with Paul speaking separately to the camera. The intimate hotel room and backstage footage taken by the Maysles brothers, Albert and David, is also used.

The film chronicles the band’s arrival in New York in 1964 and their legendary live performance on The Ed Sullivan Show, with the host resembling a cautious, funny Richard Nixon. Craig Brown’s book One Two Three Four points out that the Beatles’ appearance on the show followed an endless succession of forgotten support acts who, although they might have eagerly accepted the TV booking at the time, were doomed to be hated by an impatient nation because are not the Beatles, forever tainted by their sheer irrelevance. In this film you see someone from the TV audience gaping at one of these lesser mortals.

The band’s first US concert was in Washington DC, where the staff and officials at a British Embassy reception infamously disgraced themselves with their boorish snobbery towards the band; a well-spoken guy is shown mockingly saying he had no patriotic pride in the Beatles. Then it was back to New York to play Carnegie Hall, and then to Miami, where they got to work with Muhammad Ali, although there is no film footage of that.

As always, the Beatles’ four faces glow with disbelieving bewilderment and joy at the surreal storm swirling around them; they radiate an inexhaustible, almost supernatural energy, cracking and laughing, and apparently never in a bad mood with the cameras constantly shoved in their faces. They are in good spirits and bewildered by New York radio DJ Murray Kaufman, or Murray the K, who has somehow managed to hang out with them in their hotel room, and no one knows exactly who allowed him to do this . . The film gives us some beautiful close-ups of the band’s faces as they play – I’d never noticed before that George seemed to be standing on stage for a moment at times.

Writer Joe Queenan chokes up as he remembers how he felt when he first heard the Beatles on the radio; that eerie alchemy of voices, at once galvanized by rock ‘n’ roll energy and yet innocent and non-threatening. They were cathedral choristers of romantic joy, and the band that gave white America permission to rock and lighten their spirits after Kennedy’s assassination. Part of the documentary is interested in how soft and even exotically non-binary the Beatles looked – so different from what Betty Friedan describes as the Prussian masculinity that was beholden to American masculinity at the time. (Again, without knowing it, they paved the way for America’s acceptance of British-androgynous glam rock.)

Photographer Harry Benson is interviewed today and confides that John, nervous about how he and the others would go down with the American public, found himself talking about Lee Harvey Oswald. Lennon also makes a relevant point: “The Beatles and their ilk were created through the vacuum of non-conscription… we were the army that never was.” Conscription was abolished… and rock ‘n’ roll took its place? It’s an intriguing thought, although it must be said that Elvis Presley did military service.

And what’s still amazing is how short it was; within a few years, the Beatles and their music would evolve into something completely different. They would break up a few years later, while still only in their twenties. An astonishing split second of cultural history.