Often with subjects that command such a wide scope, it’s not just the story, but the one who is telling it. Acclaimed director Ron Howard is the latest to take on music’s Everest, also known as The Beatles, with his feature-length documentary Eight Days A Week: The Touring Years 2-DVD/blu-ray Special Edition. As one of the most fertile phenomena of the last century, there never seems a shortage of new angles, footage, interviews, and tales to be told about the Fab Four, or at least woven together from old ones.

Howard focuses his lens on the years that the quartet was a performing band, mainly 1963-1966, with an informing prologue of the band members’ individual and collective histories before they became the most famous foursome in the world, and a concluding thought as the they gave up the road in favor of studio work, and eventually the band, itself, for solo careers. The clips of concert appearances are most convincing of the group’s charismatic stage presence and road-honed abilities as musicians. Some of the excerpts that likely everyone remembers being in black and white have been colorized, and while this does bring the boys to life in one sense, ultimately it ends up a bit distracting; the skin and hair tones striking an obvious unnatural uniformity. It does, though, show Howard’s desire to present this sonic boom of a historical moment in its most vivid light.

That seems to be the approach for the parallel context and commentary, drawing on the Kennedy assassination and racial unrest alongside input from the likes of Malcolm Gladwell, Whoopi Goldberg, and Elvis Costello. Howard has a history as a director of dramatizing real-life figures, but here is a concerted effort to pull the drama out, and humanize the band at a time in their careers when they were elevated to supernatural heights. Interviews, archival and present, with John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr are steered toward describing the feeling of being in the eye of that hurricane, and their attempts to enjoy it as young men as well as improve as artists.

The second disc digs deeper into the roots, looking at the songwriting process, as well as the humor, that made The Beatles so successful and endearing. It also features 12 minutes of full performances of songs ranging from 1963-1965. There is a conspicuous lack of contribution from the late George Martin (to whom the film is dedicated) or Geoff Emerick, two enormously important figures in the Beatle lore; to be fair, while essential to the band’s musical development, they were mainly involved in the studio rather than on tour.

Eight Days a Week does come with the full cooperation of McCartney, Starr, and the families of Lennon and Harrison. It is with that privilege that this feature-length documentary, for the moment, stands alone. It is the story of The Beatles on the road, told carefully and respectfully, while retaining the nascent, unbridled energy of a young band as a live performing ensemble and the resulting mass hysteria of their fans that consequently made this moment in time still worthy of reflection 50 years later.