If Peter Jackson’s The Beatles: Get Back was the supreme document of the Beatles’ final moments together and of their dissolution, Morgan Neville’s Man on the Run is a kind of sequel.
It begins in late 1969, just months after Savile Row rooftop concert. The Beatles have broken up. Paul McCartney has seemingly disappeared. There are even rumors that he’s dead. On a remote farm in Scotland, a confused and distraught McCartney wonders whether he’ll write “another note, ever.”
But the most surprising thing about revisiting this tumultuous, tabloid-ready period of McCartney’s life is a simple fact. When the Beatles broke up, McCartney was 27 years old. To say he had lived a lifetime by then would be an understatement. By just the sheer enormity of their production and colossal cultural impact, you might easily mistakenly put McCartney in middle age by then.
Photo: AP
Man on the Run is the story of everything that came after. McCartney, an executive producer, is never seen sitting for an interview, but his off-camera musings mark the movie, a chronicle of self renewal. For McCartney, kept boyish by the Beatles, the band’s end meant a sudden coming of age.
“I had to look inside myself and find something that wasn’t the Beatles,” McCartney says in the film.
How you feel about McCartney’s post-Beatles career might inform how you feel about Man on the Run. For Neville, the celebrated documentary filmmaker of Won’t You Be My Neighbor, Piece by Piece and 20 Feet From Stardom, it’s a period that offers no neat narrative, but — quite unlike the mythic Beatles years — something more like the ups and down of life, with regrets and triumphs along the way.
Photo: AP
It didn’t get off to a good start. McCartney, blamed for the Beatles breakup, was guilt-ridden. His first records were a disappointment. Singing with Linda McCartney, his wife, wasn’t greeted well. A 1973 TV special that included a rendition of Mary Had a Little Lamb was, to put it a mildly, a misjudgment. A curious feature of McCartney’s largely sunny disposition is a nagging self-loathing.
“If I hear someone damning Paul McCartney, I tend to believe them,” he says, referencing the Beatles split.
Get Back offered a revelatory window into the group’s dynamics that put many of the old views of McCartney to bed. Comparisons are tough — Get Back is one of the greatest docs of the century — but Jackson’s film, drawn largely from footage shot by Michael Lindsay-Hogg, was also incredibly intimate. It captured not only the band’s individual relationships but the songwriting process in real time. (The emergence of Get Back from McCartney’s strumming and humming stands as one of the great sequences in documentary film.)
Man on the Run lacks that sense of closeness. By keeping the film in archival — the documentary is full of family photos and home movies — and without present-day talking heads, Neville lets us experience McCartney’s post-Beatles years as he did. It comes as a sacrifice, though, to a nearness to McCartney — and to the creation of his solo songs — that might have deepened the film.
The real arc of Man on the Run is building toward the creation of McCartney’s first post-Beatles band, Wings. It’s in some ways an unlikely centerpiece. In the revolving makeup of the band, Denny Laine was the only permanent member outside Paul and Linda. On the other hand, Wings’ Band on the Run is the best album McCartney produced after the Beatles, and the clear culmination of years of struggle. If you needed one, this is your cue to go play Jet loud.
It turns out, to no one’s surprise, it’s hard to move on after being in the Beatles — especially for someone like McCartney who believed so sincerely in the band. Like its subject, Man on the Run inevitably pales next to films of the Beatles heyday. But it’s a meaningful companion piece about the end of an era and the start of a long and winding road.
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