In an interview with music producer Danny Bennett in David Tedeschi’s documentary “Beatles ’64,” we see that the Beatles have always been a marketing juggernaut. Bennett shows us Beatles nylons, a Beatles dress, Beatles sneakers, and perhaps the most bizarre item upon which to slap the Fab Four’s faces, Beatles talcum powder.

While it’s easy to be cynical about “Beatles ’64” as just another thing to sell that repackages the iconic group, it’s important to remember that just because there are a lot of Beatles products, that doesn’t mean all products are created equal or that they instantly cheapen the band’s music.

Thankfully, “Beatles ’64” is far more worthwhile than Beatles talcum powder.

Working off footage shot by legendary documentarians Albert and David Maysles, “Beatles ’64” focuses on the Beatles’ first trip to America in February 1964. That two-week tour included the group’s unforgettable debut on “The Ed Sullivan Show,” playing at the Washington Coliseum and playing Carnegie Hall. But the larger context of their arrival coincided with the nation reeling from the Kennedy Assassination and not quite sure what to make of young women going crazy for these shaggy-haired boys from Liverpool.

While the footage helps bring us into the whirlwind of the tour, Tedeschi augments this journey with remembrances from Beatles’ fans, fellow musicians, new interviews with Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, and archival interviews with McCartney and Starr as well as the late John Lennon and George Harrison.

Through these lenses, a clearer picture emerges of why exactly the Beatles blew up as big as they did when they landed in New York City. While it would have been nice to get more of an understanding of the Beatles’ rise in popularity in England and how they caught on in the U.S. before physically arriving, the laser-focus on 1964 tells a story about cultural forces that caught some Americans off-guard. Within the bounds of this arrival, the film is able to examine how much the Beatles owed to Black music (music they had easy access to without any societal friction because there wasn’t Jim Crow in Liverpool), their excitement to meet Black musicians and how mainstream American society wasn’t sure how to deal with young men who created sexual awakenings in teenage girls but also did not fit a typical masculine archetype.

It would be easy to brush all of this off as, “The sixties were a vibrant and exciting time full of change,” but thankfully, Tedeschi avoids this route. Rather than try to encompass all the upheavals in America, we see why this time of disruption was conducive to the Beatles and their music. It was not so much that the Beatles changed everything as much as they were a reflection of societal changes as well as the limits of American acceptance. As Ronald Isley of The Isley Brothers points out, The Beatles covering “Twist and Shout” was great for sales of the Isley Brothers’ preceding version, but it wasn’t The Isley Brothers getting invited onto “The Ed Sullivan Show” or making the cover of Life Magazine.

When looking at The Beatles’ arrival and success through the lens of American culture in 1964, you have a unique documentary about the band that never loses sight of how much fun the guys are and their unique place in music history. It’s only when trying to work backwards, as the film does in trying to argue that The Beatles were a healing force in the wake of Kennedy’s assassination, that the documentary feels less sure-footed. Even The Beatles seem to acknowledge in retrospect that they were caught in a whirlwind rather than creating the storm.

Is “Beatles ’64” a largely uncritical look at The Beatles? Sure. It’s made by Apple Corps Ltd., and with the participation of the surviving members as well as the families of Harrison and Lennon. It’s far from the first Beatles documentary and it certainly won’t be the last. But it achieves escape velocity on being a puff piece by bringing viewers into a specific cultural moment with the benefit of hindsight. We know that the young men we’re seeing in the Maysles’ footage will be completely transformed in only five short years, unrecognizable from the mop-topped boys in matching suits.

Perhaps “Beatles ’64” will only appeal to Beatlemaniacs like myself, but that doesn’t diminish its strength showing the birth of Beatlemania in America.

“Beatles ’64” will be released exclusively on Disney+ on Friday, Nov. 29.