But Lester also goes out of his way to show the love that the Beatles' audience gave back. In the movie's final concert sequence, his camera doesn't make the euphorically hysterical girls in the audience objects of ridicule; they're simply stand-ins for all the rest of us. He shows them to us as if to say, "This is the only natural response to this sound, to these young men." As the camera scans the crowd, it rests four times on a round-faced blond, her face streaked with tears. Lester has referred to her as "the white rabbit," an obviously affectionate nickname for a girl whose charged pleasure is so close to the surface, and so genuine it's almost a compressed premonition of the devotion the Beatles would inspire for the rest of their career and beyond. She looks as if she's forgotten who she is, or what planet she's landed on: Her connection with the figures onstage is maddeningly remote and yet cosmically complete.

She wanted to know, as we still want to know: Just who were they? Watching "A Hard Day's Night" in a screening room, in the middle of an otherwise mundane workweek, I found myself enraptured not just by the look of the movie, or by the look of the boys (and God, what boys!), but by songs I'd heard hundreds of times. The suedelike harmonies on "If I Fell," the hard open chord that kicks off the title track like a clap of thunder with all the colors of the universe in it: Who were these men? I don't think I'll ever know, and that's at least half the pleasure I take in them.

I love "A Hard Day's Night" because I love to watch the Beatles move. I love the goofy sackless sack race on the field; I love the way they look onstage, restrained and almost businesslike, the way George taps his foot like a country gentleman and the way Paul jerks his head to get a sweaty forelock out of his way. I love them as individuals only because of who they were as a whole -- because how else can most of us know them? (Even a solo record is still a Beatles solo record.)

Part of the magic of "A Hard Day's Night" is the way screenwriter Alun Owen figured out how to give the right jokes to the right boy. The script may feel improvisational, but all the dialogue and action were tightly scripted. Even so, Owen made it a point to spend time with the Beatles to get a sense of the kinds of things they might say. That's why, when a journalist asks Ringo if he's a mod or a rocker, his deadpan answer ("I'm a mocker") feels like pure Richard Starkey.

The barest truth, though, is that the Beatles as individuals are closed off to most of us -- closed off to everyone except their close friends and their families. They've sometimes complained that they sacrificed themselves to celebrity, that their notoriety as one of the greatest bands in the world stripped them of any personal identity. In the new "Beatles Anthology" book, George Harrison says of the band's raging success, "It was a very one-sided love affair. The people gave their money and they gave their screams, but the Beatles gave their nervous systems, which is a much more difficult thing to give."

You might wish Harrison would be a little less churlish -- after all, the fans probably had a little something to do with financing his country estate -- but you can see his point. The fact remains, though, that we didn't just take: They gave. It's not our job to accept them as mere mortals. We have a better chance of understanding them as inseparable parts of a whole.

And partly because it incorporates visuals and music, and partly because it's simply magic, "A Hard Day's Night" gives us a priceless flash picture of that whole. It's 85 minutes of screen time that represents one crystallized moment not in the Beatles' career per se but in the parallel career they forged inside all of us, the one that will last beyond any breakup, retirement or death. As we see them in "A Hard Day's Night," the four of them together are a spectacular vision of youth and freedom, the kind of thing that ballads are written about and revolutions are fought over. Some 35 years later, they're not quite bigger than Jesus, but almost. And like him, they did give their lives for us, whether they wanted to or not.

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