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As someone who almost always jumps at the chance to learn more about how the proverbial sausage is made, I wish something like Peter Jackson’s Get Back existed for all my favorite musical artists. This epic documentary, released on Disney+ in two-and-a-half-hour-ish chunks across Thanksgiving weekend, is an intimate, nearly eight-hour-long behind-the-scenes look at the creative process. The film specifically covers the three-week period in January 1969 The Beatles took to cobble together some of the songs on their penultimate album, Abbey Road (1969), and all the ones later found on Let It Be (1970). 

Get Back is basically an extended cut of the much-derided — and hard to find a copy of — 1970 documentary by Michael Lindsay-Hogg named after that last album. Lindsay-Hogg’s efforts to comprehensively chronicle that high-stress period — climaxing with the band’s unknowingly final public performance atop the rickety roof of Apple Corps. headquarters — culminated in about 60 hours of video footage and 150 hours of audio. Everything was meant to be in service to what was originally envisioned as a TV special tentatively released in tandem with The Beatles’ next album and much-anticipated return to live performance. 

Read the rest of the review at 425.