Paul McCartney: Man on the Run Evaluate

Apart from perhaps Bob Dylan, The Beatles and their particular person members are essentially the most documented, written-about musical artists of all time. Frontmen John Lennon and Paul McCartney had a chemistry “we’re seemingly by no means to see once more,” or so argues John’s son, Sean Ono Lennon. But, there are all the time new avenues to discover, and Oscar-winning documentarian Morgan Neville (Piece by Piece, Will not You Be My Neighbor?, 20 Ft from Stardom) has chosen a decidedly lovely and elegiac one: Paul’s highway to self-actualization after the band broke up.

Paul McCartney: Man on the Run is an archival doc which makes use of footage, some gentle animation, nonetheless pictures and off-screen testimonials to color a portrait of a singular artist whose devotion to the craft is second to none — though well-liked opinion nonetheless appears to favor the romanticized Lennon. But, Neville’s movie will not be hagiographic, however relatively lovingly sincere. The movie will not be even, probably not, an appraisal of McCartney’s artistry, however relatively an perception into the precise nooks and crannies of an exceedingly uncommon existence.

Man on the Run focuses on McCartney’s journey on the tail finish of The Beatles historic run, in 1969, when Lennon privately advised his bandmates he was performed, into the early a part of the Nineteen Eighties after McCartney’s subsequent band Wings broke up — and Lennon was assassinated. Sketching McCartney and Lennon’s friendship, acrimony and eventual reconciliation as fated, Neville means that McCartney’s progress as an artist and as a human had been irrevocably tied to The Beatles and to a relationship with Lennon throughout area and time.

Although it was Lennon who initially broke up the band, strain from studio representatives pressured the 4 members into secrecy till McCartney was roughly pressured to go public. Mass misunderstanding and media complicity crafted a model of occasions that made it appear as if it was McCartney who instigated the top of The Beatles, portray him as each cash hungry, petulant and obsessed along with his personal fame. However McCartney was none of these items within the early Seventies: he and new spouse Linda decamped to the Scottish countryside in a home so rundown that even fixers would suppose twice at its buy.

Neville traces McCartney’s journey from his preliminary solitude, which was so profitable that a lot of the world assumed he was lifeless, to creating his first solo album, Ram (initially panned however praised in perpetuity), to his formation of Wings, to being publicly kicked out of Japan for marijuana possession. Musically, the doc frames McCartney’s journey as one among a battle to seek out his personal sound, however McCartney himself frames it one other manner, as one to simply accept his work for what it was with out the inconceivable job of matching his former band’s success.

Edited by Alan Lowe with a steadily cheeky humorousness that matches confessionals with matching music or picture, the documentary traces an unstated connection between lived expertise and creative expression that has hardly ever been equaled by every other artist. It is a gorgeous movie that entertains in as a lot measure because it deconstructs an typically untouchable icon, making him appear extra human, and thus, extra spectacular.

It’s the movie’s therapy of his friendship with John Lennon that’s its most touching calling card. The 2 artists have lengthy been painted as former lovers whose basic variations triggered an irrevocable rift, partly due to politics: Lennon the unconventional, McCartney the conservative. However, like François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard, their falling out was all the time extra sensationalized than actuality, their ideological separation exaggerated for editorial functions. In fact, McCartney and Lennon had been all the time certain with mutual respect, love and a devotion to radical honesty.

While you lose somebody as shut as that, you get break up in two. For McCartney, the sudden shock of Lennon’s homicide was a debilitating occasion, however, as Neville argues, it was additionally the second {that a} new artist was born. Paul McCartney, separate from The Beatles, a definite artist with a bucolic poetry in lyricism fully his personal. A person on the run no extra. Not less than not from himself.

Paul McCartney: Man on the Run streams on Amazon Prime Video on February twenty seventh, 2026.