Did The Beatles borrow the idea for Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band from the Beach Boys?

David Crosby, left, and Jakob Dylan in the documentary Echo in the Canyon

Echo in the Canyon (PG)

Apple, PSN, Microsoft, Google and Fetch

★★★★

I’ve noticed a few movies of late in which music label executives are villains, most notably Mike Myers as the EMI Records boss arguing with Queen and their six-minute song in the Oscar-winning Bohemian Rhapsody (2018). Perhaps that’s why former Capitol Records chief executive Andrew Slater decided to put himself behind the camera in the music documentary Echo in the Canyon, his directorial debut.

This is a gentle film about rock ‘n’ roll, which almost sounds like an oxymoron. It’s about the creation of a new kind of music, the Californian sound, a blend of folk and rock, in Laurel Canyon, Los Angeles.

It’s fascinating for what it includes – candid on camera interviews with the now famous musicians of the time such as Brian Wilson, David Crosby, Michelle Phillips, Stephen Stills and Roger McGuinn – and for what it omits.

There are four main bands: The Byrds, The Mammas & the Pappas, The Beach Boys and Buffalo Springfield. Above them all, over in London, are The Beatles.

There’s an intriguing discussion about how much the LA bands borrowed from The Beatles, and from each other, and whether the Fab Four borrowed back. One suggested link is Beatles-Byrds-Beach Boys-Beatles.

Tom Petty, in what would be his final on-camera interview, reckons The Beach Boys 1966 album Pet Sounds inspired The Beatles 1967 album Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. “Imagine that,’’ says singer-songwriter Jackson Brown, “a band that influences The Beatles.’’ Ringo Starr, interviewed alongside a beautiful sports car that he no doubt owns, is cagey on this question.

Petty, Brown, Eric Clapton and Neil Young, all influenced by the Laurel Canyon bands, are interviewed. In an interesting twist, the interviewer is singer-songwriter Jakob Dylan, son of the 2016 Nobel laureate in literature.

There’s a deadpan moment when David Crosby (The Byrds) talks about performing Mr Tambourine Man one day when, unexpectedly, “Dylan turned up’’. The interviewer, with a straight face, asks him to be more specific.

I thought about this afterwards, Imagine being Bob Dylan’s son. You may as well, as far as some people believe, be God’s son, except the huge difference is God didn’t put out a record while Jesus was on Earth.

The movie focuses on the years 1965-67. Dylan Jnr and contemporaries, including Beck, Fiona Apple, Regina Spektor and Norah Jones, put together a concert in 2015 to mark the 50th anniversary of the Laurel Canyon movement and the director deftly switches from clips of this to 60s clips of the original bands doing the same songs. After seeing the movie, I bought the soundtrack. A highlight is Jakob Dylan and Neil Young performing, in the anxious 21st-century, the 1966 Beach Boys Song I Just Wasn’t Made For These Times. This goes to the echo of the title. The Laurel Canyon musicians inspired not just their immediate successors but other artists up to today.

“We were putting good poetry on the radio,’’ says Crosby, who looks like a whaling boat captain. “It changed everything for everybody.”

That 1965-67 timeframe means there are some omissions. Joni Mitchell, who moved to the area in 1968, is not mentioned. Even more surprising is that no-one talks about Jim Morrison, who was living there in 1966 as The Doors put together their debut album. Perhaps Morrison’s music was not part of the “old folk songs with a Beatles beat” that is the main point of discussion.

Also missing, by and large, is any discussion of sex and drugs. Dylan is an unusual interviewer. Most of the time he sits still, looking handsome and aloof, while the musicians speak. One assumes the questions are asked off-camera or edited out. The one time he does blink is when Michelle Phillips (The Mammas & the Pappas) starts talking about her marital infidelities. “I was a very busy girl!”

When it comes to drugs, Roger McGuinn (The Byrds) does tell some droll stories about going to London and hanging out with John, Paul, George, Ringo and their joint-rolling butler. It’s also noted that Brian Wilson, who his contemporaries unfazedly compare with Mozart, liked a bit of speed.

It’s David Crosby, in his Captain Ahab look, who is the weirdest and most powerful towards the end. “Ladies and gentleman,’’ he says, looking directly into the camera, “This is why I left the Byrds.” He tells the story. His former associates, though, tell a much different one.

It’s that sort of movie: absorbing, revealing and withholding at the same time. And that comes as no surprise, given the people involved. It’s Clapton who sort of sums up Laurel Canyon: “I loved it because I was attracted to eccentrics and they were all there.”

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A scene from the French film We'll All End Up Together

We’ll End Up Together (M)

Selected cinemas

★★★½

The French drama-comedy We’ll End Up Together, directed and co-written by Guillaume Canet, is a sequel to his 2010 film Little White Lies, which was a box office hit in France and abroad. Most of the ensemble cast return, including Oscar winner Marion Cotillard.

Each film is centred on a group of friends who meet – or used to meet – once a year, during the holiday season, at the seaside home of restaurateur Max (Francois Cluzet) and his wife Veronique (Valerie Bonneton).

The “used to meet” is because in the first movie the fortnight in Cap Ferret turned less than chic as the friends were caught out in the little white lies they had been telling each other for a long time.

Max and would-be actor Eric (Gilles Lellouche) had a serious run-in. There were also elements of homophobia in Max’s response to osteopath Vincent (Benoit Magimel), who was married but attracted to his long-term male friend.

When the new movie opens Max is alone at the holiday house. He’s about to turn 60 and depressed. We quickly learn he is separated from his wife and that his business has collapsed. He is penniless and plans to sell the house.

He does have a new partner, Sabine (Clementine Baert). “I need to be alone,’’ he tells her. “I’m suffocating.” He doesn’t mean from her. He means from everyone else. He doesn’t get what he wants. It’s been three years since he last saw his friends but they turn up at the house, uninvited and unannounced, to mark his 60th birthday.

They immediately suffocate him, in that French fashion: lots of hugs and kisses on both cheeks and questions about his life. He doesn’t like it, not least because his estranged wife is due to turn up at the house in three days, for her own holiday. She is still friends with the friends.

“You dumped me like a piece of shit,’’ he tells them. When they protest and note their friendship goes back a long way, he says: “Buddies for 20 years doesn’t mean buddies forever.”

It’s interesting to think the 132-minute movie could have ended there, if his friends respected his wishes and left him alone. They do not, of course, and so we have two hours of them talking a lot and interrogating the whole question of friendship, as it applies to Max and to each other. It’s small-time actor Antoine (Laurent Lafitte), working as Eric’s assistant, who best sums up the situation. Friends don’t need to be with you all the time, he says, but when you need help, as Max does, then your friends have to be there.

Life has changed for some of them. Eric is now semi-famous, a “poor man’s George Clooney”, as the beautiful, wild, angry Sabine (Cotillard) puts it. Vincent has brought his boyfriend, a choreographer named Alex (Mikail Wattincourt). Vincent’s former wife, Isabelle (Pascale Arbillot), is there too, and she looks so great that she catches male attention, including from her ex.

And some of the old tensions remain. In one of the best scenes, Vincent and Alex leave the dinner table to dance to Elton John and Kiki Dee’s Don’t Go Breaking My Heart. They cajole Max into joining them and the result is awkward. The soundtrack, all in English, works well. When Antoine tries it on with Isabelle, Bryan Ferry croons Slave to Love in the background.

There is a dramatic shift towards the end that saves this movie from being a two-hour conversation. Indeed this extended scene answers — or even eliminates — the questions the friends have been wrangling. There are some things that matter more than anything; things that don't need to be debated.

I suspect viewers will consider their own friendships, and respond to this movie accordingly. I found it a watchable light entertainment but also frustrating. Personally speaking, if I had friends who talked so much and asked me personal questions, I, like Max, would want to take a holiday from them, not with them.

The director says he will consider making a third instalment, perhaps when the friends are another decade older, in their late 60s. I’d be interested to see that.