MIDAS MAN, a film by JOE STEPHENSON

Among the many big problems for a film like this – a biopic of the short, fast life of the Beatles' manager Brian Epstein – is that many of the characters in it are so familiar: four of them among the best known faces in the world, even now.

So invariably some responses default to: well he (Jonah Lees, Phantom of the Open) does look a bit like John Lennon but he's far too short; that guy's certainly got McCartney's eyebrows but little else; that felluh looks very unlike George and the hair is awkward, that other one looks nothing like Ringo, the slightly large nose aside.

Then there is someone playing Cilla Black, Jay Leno totally out of place as Ed Sullivan, a passable George Martin . . .

Okay, we don't come to a movie like this for verisimilitude (did Robert Powell look anything like Jesus?) but an added hurdle is that much of the story is so well known all the narrative can do is tick off moments: Epstein seeing the Beatles at the Cavern and experiencing an epiphany, buying them suits, getting rid of drummer Pete Best (arguably the best set-piece scenes, ironic given Best has been considered almost mute in most accounts), the Beatles being turned down by record companies and so on.

The story arc is one of success, self-doubt by the increasingly drug dependent Epstein, his struggles with being gay, the accidental death at 32.

To its credit however, director Stephenson -- while struggling to make much of the central figures beyond image and accent – allows the dapper Epstein (Jacob Fortune-Lloyd, The Queen's Gambit) to break the fourth wall and talk directly to us explaining motivation and moods.

The montages accelerate the pace – sometimes a bit too much as his artists have hits: “hit after hit after” covers a vibrant and thrilling year for them, him, Liverpool and Britain.

And so it goes: a fast-forward through the years of Beatlemania and Swinging London which doesn't have much resonance in the absence of Beatle songs.

Liverpool's Mathew Street where the Cavern is located is given an authentically brown, abandoned look, the Cavern and Epstein's record shop look realistic in a staged way, Epstein's parents (Eddie Marsan and Emily Watson) are soundly drawn and believable, Eddie Izzard rumbles in briefly as the Beatles first manager Alan Williams.

And towards the end when the Beatles have changed beyond recognition from the lads in suits, the stuck-on moustaches seem to have a life of their own.

Midas Man works on a very superficial level and we rarely get telling glimpses into Epstein or his charges.

Unfortunately now that this quite remarkable story – a self-conscious gay man taking four scruffy lads to the top of the world through his belief in them – has been given the screen treatment we can't expect it will happen again.

It deserved better than this: a film at some level about music, but which looks like a musical without the music.

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Midas Man is currently in selected cinemas

A tip: programme your viewing with Nowhere Boy, Backbeat, Eight Days a Week, Midas Man and the first disc of the Anthology and you've got the story of the Beatles' early years, fiction and fact.