J Paul Johnson
Echoing the title of ex-Beatle Paul McCartney’s most acclaimed solo work in the wake of his former band’s breakup, Man on the Run, the new documentary from Morgan Neville (20 Feet from Stardom, Won’t You Be My Neighbor?) channels the themes of that song and so many of Sir Paul’s early solo work. “Band on the Run” is all about the melancholia of claustrophobia, flight from confinement, and the desire to break free of constraints. Those are the kinds of challenges McCartney faced in the early 1970s and make for an excellent focus in this arresting new documentary debuting in theaters and streaming on Prime Video.
Rather than aim to tell McCartney’s life story or even the entirety of his solo career, Neville focuses primarily on those first few years after The Beatles’ breakup in Man on the Run, loosely framing the narrative between then and the 1979 dissolution of his ’70s vehicle Wings. It was a time when McCartney was in dire straits. Due in part to his own naïveté, he found himself largely blamed for the breakup of The Beatles and excoriated in the newly-powerful rock press. His longtime best friend John Lennon had begun a series of high-profile interviews deconstructing Fab Four myth and largely dismissing Paul’s contributions as “granny music”—a label that would sting, and stick, for more than a decade.
And, although McCartney more than anyone worked to keep The Beatles a viable band for as long as he could (just see his work ethic in the Get Back docuseries!), he had no control over the breakup narrative. Bandmates Ringo Starr and George Harrison sided with Lennon. McCartney, at just 27, having been seemingly on top of the world for most of his short adult life, was now suddenly the odd man out, his abilities questioned—the only job he’d ever known lost for good—and wondering what to do next. He hit the bottle, way too hard by his own account, and retreated, unsure of himself to a roughshod farm he’d bought in Scotland.
Fortunately for him, and for us, even in retreat Paul McCartney could rely on two unstoppable superpowers. The first was the love of his wife Linda, who stood with him and gave him the tough love he needed to get to work. The second was his own unparalleled musical talent, which he soon began channeling into a body of work that was, if different from that of The Beatles, so idiosyncratic and unexpected it took critics decades to fully appreciate. That Linda was a world-class photographer—and happened even to shoot some video footage of their days on their farm—brings together these incredible qualities in Man on the Run, which benefits greatly from the fact that many of Linda’s photos and video had never been publicly seen until now.
Neville provides the necessary background and exposition for the McCartneys’ story with some engaging and clever animations, doing so quickly and efficiently. The focus here is not on The Beatles but on a “Man on the Run” from his past, striving to reinvent himself with his former mates, the rock press, and his former fandom all largely aligned against him. Every single one of his first few albums was pilloried in the press. McCartney was too unpolished and homespun. Ram was too slick and silly (Rolling Stone called it “the nadir in the decomposition of Sixties rock,” “incredibly inconsequential” and “monumentally irrelevant”). Wings’ Wild Life just a loosy-goosy jam. Singles fared little better. The lightweight “Another Day” may have been a hit, but “Give Ireland Back to the Irish” and “Mary Had a Little Lamb” seemed only to prove his incompetence.
And yet, most of McCartney’s music of this era has proved to be both uniquely compelling and prescient. He practically invented the later home-studio DIY recording ethic with the tuneful, touching debut album McCartney. Ram was a wild sonic symphony and vocal showcase (his and Linda’s harmonies both) extraordinaire—one of the best albums not just by an ex-Beatle, but by anyone, anywhere, anytime. There was one constant: his love for Linda, expressed over and over again in a series of memorable hits (“Maybe I’m Amazed,” “My Love”) and deep cuts (“The Lovely Linda,” “Long-Haired Lady,” “Letting Go”) alike. How deep? The only nights the two ever spent apart from each other before her death were those Paul spent in a Tokyo jail after a pot bust there.
To my thinking, Man on the Run doesn’t go quite far enough to convey just how brilliant much of McCartney’s solo and Wings output truly is, but that’s an aesthetic choice. In any case, there are dozens of scholarly tomes and smart podcasts on that topic. Neville’s documentary eschews talk-to interviews, lower-thirds chyrons, and the like, aiming for a more free-flowing, less traditionally expository approach. So, there are no rock critics on camera, for instance, telling us how much we should finally appreciate Ram (Sean Ono Lennon does, though, in voice-over). We have instead some new voice interview from Sir Paul, used to frame the film’s beginning and ending and signal time shifts, plus archival interview content from Linda McCartney, the other Beatles, and Wings members Henry McCullough, Denny Seiwell and Denny Laine.
Neville’s choices make for an immersive experience. It may not be quite as experimental as Brett Morgen’s Bowie doc Moonage Daydream, but Man on the Run aims for a similar, verité-inspired recounting of an extraordinary phenomenon. To watch Man on the Run is to gain a new sense of appreciation and admiration for a unique marriage—and I don’t mean by that only the one between Paul and Linda. There is the unique marriage of an unequalled musical talent married to an indomitable work ethic, one that kicked in, and hard, with the world against him and in the wake of several high-profile, high-risk mistakes in the early 1970s to make not just “silly love songs” but a series of delightfully canny, catchy, and sometimes even a little crazy records.
That the documentary was made with the full cooperation of Paul McCartney may skew it towards the positive, sure, but it also ensures that Man on the Run features lots of solo Sir Paul and Wings tunes, from “Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey,” “Live and Let Die,” and “Jet,” to “Junior’s Farm” from One Hand Clapping, “Listen to What the Man Said,” “Silly Love Songs,” “Let ‘Em In,” and “Mull of Kintyre,” which effectively closes out the narrative with a plaintive ode to the land that let McCartney find himself once again. Some newly recorded and more-intimate-than-usual narration from Paul speaks directly to his anxieties, fears, and dreams.
Still touring the world with three-hour rock shows at the tender age of 83, Sir Paul McCartney today hardly needs Beatles fans or rock critics to celebrate him or his work. Nor can he possibly need much in terms of wealth. What Man on the Run does so well is to show just how, in a time of deep depression, self-doubt, and alcohol dependency he found, in his music and his longtime love Linda, a way out. He grew wings—in retrospect, a perfect metaphor for the flight he would take—and persevered when so many others of his generation fell prey to those very same dangers. His is a long and complex legacy, and Man on the Run, in focusing so tightly on McCartney’s first few post-Beatles years, conveys an important phase of it.
