The Beatles are so much of a cultural phenomenon 51 years after their breakup that no one film or project is going to explain the whole story.
The group is like a 10,000 piece jigsaw puzzle that is starting fill in but still has huge spaces. “Man on the Run,” Morgan Neville’s documentary about Paul McCartney forming Wings is a new corner piece that every fan will want to help place on the board.
The movie will play on Amazon Prime, but first it gets showings around the country in theaters tomorrow (Thursday) and on Sunday. It’s worth seeing on the big screen.
Neville had total access to the Beatles archives, so he’s able to with a quick recap of the famous group. It’s the first 40 minutes of his film that is absolutely captivating and kind of a great backstage explanation for how the Beatles broke up, what McCartney did upon going solo, and his relationship with John Lennon through the 1970s.
The balance of “Man on the Run” is full of great unseen archival material as Wings lifted off to become a huge success in the 1970s. Plenty of people, including an insightful Sean Ono Lennon, Chrissie Hynde, and various members of Wings including Denny Laine, lend their voices to the story with keen observations.
But it’s those first 40 minutes or so where director Neville constructs a disarming, intimate account of the Beatles’ demise and Paul’s rebirth as an artist. Lennon had already quit the group in secret, but when McCartney made his move the whole story fell on him. “John was quite annoyed with me,” he says, which instigated a couple of years of very bad feelings and contentious lawsuits.
Since this is a McCartney documentary, we do get his side of the Allen Klein saga, about the lawyer and record company owner who interfered with the two friends and turned them against each other. Klein, rightfully so, is painted as the villain whom ever Lennon eventually came to distrust. McCartney recalls having a dream in which Klein was his dentist, and was pulling out a tooth.
The split was so public and divisive that someone staged a play about it in London’s West End. Neville supplies a clip that looks pretty rare. (I’m not a Beatles savant, so I’d never heard of any of this. Crazy!)
At the same time, McCartney was adrift and frightened of how to live a post-Beatles life. He threw himself into his family and living on a farm, but he also admits — as he’s done in the past– that for a couple of months he drank heavily. For a minute, he actually regretted leaving Liverpool for London and the world stage.
If you were alive at the time, you’ll remember that Lennon lashed out at Paul with a nasty song on the “Imagine” album called “How Do You Sleep”? This was in response to Paul suing the other members to break up the group. Lennon sang: “The only thing you done was Yesterday/And since you’re gone you’re just Another Day.”
McCartney speaks on the record about that, but Neville for some reason leaves out the song Paul wrote in response — “Dear Friend” — on the first official album. (For some reason that album is ignored — maybe because it was included in a previous doc, “One Hand Clapping.”) But we do hear Paul’s unguarded comments about Lennon pegging him for writing just a handful of songs like “Let it Be” and “The Long and Winding Road.”
“Well, fuck you,” McCartney says. “How do I sleep at night? Just fine!”
Well after John’s assassination in 1980, Paul observes, “One of the great blessings is that we made up. It’s beautiful and it’s sad. We loved each other all our lives.”
Once the sniping is done, Neville moves on to tell the Wings story, recounting how McCartney enlisted wife Linda (who finally gets some long deserved credit as the glue in this operation) to sing and play keyboards, the personal attacks they received for it, the response to the first and second now classic — then panned — albums, “McCartney” and “Ram.” Sean Lennon says, in retrospect, “Ram is a masterpiece, I love it.” Agreed.
Sometimes, Neville zigs when he should have zagged. He makes a big deal about the Wings hit “Mary Had a Little Lamb” being unimportant. Instead, he could have talked about Paul’s response with both a political release — “Give Ireland Back to the Irish” — a sex, drugs, and rock and roll number in “Hi Hi Hi.” Each of them got Wings banned from the radio, but they’re not mentioned here.
In the third act, “Man on the Run” turns to three events: the making of “Band on the Run,” Paul’s arrest in Japan for carrying pot through customs, and Lennon’s death. The film ends wistfully in 1980 as Wings has one last big hit in “Coming Up.” But Neville doesn’t indicate what actually is coming up — that McCartney would go on to a massive solo career as one of the top touring artists in the world, with more hits, and so on.
There also isn’t time for a lot of introspection about the decline of Wings or what went wrong with their final album, “Back to the Egg,” which was soft boiled. Still, the archive footage, the chosen live clips of Wings performing (especially a faster, much better “Silly Love Songs”) really pop, and there’s nothing like seeing McCartney at the top of his game.
Of course, here we are in 2026, Paul is almost 84 and heading out on the road to play a lot of Wings and solo hits that audiences clamor for more than ever. And there seems to be a chance of a new McCartney album maybe this year and lots of unreleased songs.
“Man on the Run” plays tomorrow night and Sunday in theaters around the country before debuting on Amazon Prime. There’s a soundtrack album and a book. I recommend also watching “One Hand Clapping.” That soundtrack is excellent.
