‘TWST: Things We Said Today’ Review: A Thrillingly Experimental Beatles Doc Serves up a Dynamic Snapshot of a Moment in Time

One could watch Andrei Ujica’s TWST: Things We Said Today, a new documentary about the Beatles’ iconic August 1965 concert at Shea Stadium, and come away feeling frustrated that the actual August 1965 concert at Shea Stadium is not, in fact, featured onscreen.

One could.

Hence my warning to you, because it would be a sad thing indeed if this lovely, eye-opening, complexly experiential (and experimental) picture disappointed anybody.

TWST is set up like a concert film, but instead it’s a combination of two nonfiction categories — the tone poem and the city symphony — that are used as fallback catch-all classifications for critics and scholars. Ujica blends them with archival rigor and effective whimsy to create a movie that’s dreamy and clear-eyed at once.

Fans of the Fab Four know, of course, that The Beatles at Shea Stadium is already a thing that exists, or at least existed, though it has been mired in various rights kerfuffles for years.

This documentary is primarily in line with the temporal disconnects of the Paul McCartney-penned titular song — which isn’t heard here, but which McCartney has referred to as “future nostalgia.”

TWST begins on Aug. 13, 1965, as the Beatles arrive in New York City. They’re the biggest band in the world, but much of the talk from local journalists — featured here interviewing fans, peppering the quartet with press conference questions and offering commentary across several mediums — is about the possibility that the Beatles might already have been usurped by other bands. For the screaming fans, John, Paul, George and Ringo couldn’t be more representative of the present. To cynical reporters, they’re the past (or perhaps those reporters are already stuck in the past themselves). And as viewers, we exist in a spectral middle ground between future, past and present.

We float over grainy, beautiful, black-and-white footage culled from countless hours of news segments and home movies, often layered for additional authenticity with radio coverage teasing the big day. The moment we’re experiencing is real and immediate, but Ujica never lets us forget that it’s a movie — that realism is an aesthetic choice, and one that a storyteller can take or leave at a moment’s notice. (TWST would make a odd/fun double-bill with the Romanian director’s 1996 film Out of the Present, a VERY different portrait of physical and temporal disconnections.)

Bear with me, because this is about to get a little dizzying: We’re taken through the day by several guides, including Geoffrey O’Brien, the teenaged reporter son of a legendary NYC DJ, and Judith Kristen, an eager adolescent concertgoer. Kristen’s words, voiced by Therese Azzara, are from her diary; O’Brien’s, performed by Tommy McCabe, from what the press notes call an “autofictional account.” Both are woven together with fragments from Ujica’s fictional short story, “Isabela, the Friend of the Butterflies.”

So we’re hearing actors reciting words that are real, except for when they’re not. The characters are visualized by artist Yann Kebbi as raw, flickering drawings overlaid atop the documentary imagery to lead us around the city. Geoffrey takes multiple cabs, going through the rough streets of Harlem and the Fulton fish market before dawn. As he gets closer and closer to the show, he simultaneously takes us further and further from our conventional expectations of this movie. Geoffrey’s journey eventually intersects in spirit with Judith’s, which includes picking up several friends and making an extended detour at the World’s Fair, which was at Flushing Meadows that year.

If you’re familiar at all with the concept of the World’s Fair (older readers are like, “Duh!” and younger readers are like, “Huh?”), you’ll know the exposition celebrated achievements from the past and predicted achievements of the future. See how that fits? One can only imagine Ujica’s pleasure at realizing that these two major events were taking place within yards of each other.

Juxtapositions like these are very important to Ujica. Sure, TWST is about a Beatles concert, but the soundtrack is populated entirely by other songs that were hits at the time, filtered through the radio or through background “noise” — passing cars, open windows and the like. Some of them, like Shirley Ellis’ “The Name Game,” don’t feel as substantive in our cultural memory today. Some of them, like James Brown’s “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag,” are every bit as substantive, but in a way that feels parallel to the Beatles-centric narrative rather than directly connected. And some of them represent an intersection, like the opening tune, Chuck Berry’s “Roll Over Beethoven,” which the Beatles famously covered (but did not play at Shea Stadium).

And sure, we like to remember the “riots” caused by Beatlemania, the images of breathless devotees pushing at barriers and fainting on peripheries — but how often do we make the connection that the Watts rebellion was taking place at that exact moment across the country? How often are we forced to reckon with the stark differences between the benign paternalism of police responses to one “riot” and the instigating and exacerbating hostility of police responses to the other “riot”?

Maybe people at the time weren’t necessarily making these connections, and maybe our guides are too youthful and innocent to make them. But Ujica lays it out here smartly, and without sacrificing the momentum as we charge forward toward an ending that’s beautiful and satisfying. Even if it denies us the thing we thought we were waiting 85 minutes to see.

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