‘Paul McCartney: Man on the Run’ Review: Finding a New Chord After the Beatles
The former Beatle revisits the turbulent 1970s — from lawsuits and low-fi experiments to Wings’ arena triumphs — tracing the long, uncertain road from breakup to reinvention.
You strike a chord and you see where it leads you,” Paul McCartney says at one point in Man on the Run, describing his creative process as if anyone could hit a single chord and casually spin it into a masterpiece like he usually does. Playing on the double meaning of “strike a chord” — both musical and emotional — he might just as well be talking about that very specific moment in his life when The Beatles had broken up and he was trying to figure out who he was on his own. A chord had definitely been struck — and how — but now he had to find out where it could possibly take him.
Over the course of this documentary, which stretches from the end of the Beatles to the death of John Lennon — essentially the 1970s and a little beyond — McCartney retraces his personal and musical path through that turbulent decade. Through a series of present-day conversations and interviews (and, judging by subtle shifts in his voice, archival ones as well), Paul offers his version of the Beatles’ breakup, the shared — and not-so-shared — responsibilities, the legal chaos that followed, and, above all, his long and at times perplexing road back to commercial success.
Anyone even vaguely familiar with Beatles lore knows that many fans and commentators have long blamed McCartney for the split. Here, he lays out his side of the story. On the personal front, the film explores his marriage to Linda McCartney, with whom he had several children — daughters Stella and Mary appear in the documentary, alongside archival recordings of Linda — and their retreat to a remote farmhouse in Scotland. It was there that Paul began recording on his own, making McCartney, an album some of the off-screen musicians and critics featured here describe as “the godfather of alternative music” for its homemade, lo-fi aesthetic. At the same time, he was trying to live a similarly stripped-down life: family-centered, surrounded by goats and sheep — and plenty of marijuana, which would land him in more than a bit of trouble.
As the decade unfolds, director Morgan Neville (of Piece by Piece and Steve! (Martin), among many other celebrity portraits) charts the shifting terrain of McCartney’s personal life and his complicated relationship with Lennon. Curiously, Ringo Starr and George Harrison are barely mentioned, as if some legal or rights-related fog still hovers in the background. The film’s central focus, though, is the formation of Wings — McCartney’s new band — with all its lineup changes, messy recording sessions, chaotic tours, and eventual breakthrough with Band on the Run, followed by their massive U.S. shows later compiled as Wings Over America.
What ultimately sets this documentary apart — even if it lacks the formal ambition or analytical depth of other Beatles-related projects (Neville is neither Martin Scorsese nor Peter Jackson) — is McCartney’s candor. He speaks openly about his missteps, his occasionally questionable tastes (the film gently ribs some of his musical choices and the bizarre TV specials he made during the period), and his own limitations in the events surrounding the Beatles’ demise. While the standard ex-Beatle narrative tends to pin much of the blame on manager Allen Klein, McCartney admits he was also driven by frustration and ego at times.
The film also revisits the harsh criticism long directed at Linda — whom Paul brought into Wings despite her lack of formal musical training — the revolving-door nature of the band’s lineup (as he wryly notes, they were essentially the prototype for Spinal Tap), and his somewhat doomed attempts to behave like “just another member of the group” when it was painfully obvious that audiences were showing up for him.
For seasoned McCartney aficionados, there may be few revelations here. But the documentary’s real value lies in its focus on a decade of astonishing productivity that rarely receives its due, especially when compared to the early-’70s peaks of Lennon and Harrison. It’s easy to forget now, but Paul was the last of the four Beatles to truly hit his stride as a solo act. At the time, Lennon was releasing Imagine and Harrison delivered the monumental All Things Must Pass, while McCartney was still fine-tuning his solo voice with albums like Ram and Wild Life — records that would only be fully reassessed and embraced years later.
Packed with previously unseen material supplied by McCartney himself — who also serves as producer — Paul McCartney: Man on the Run will undoubtedly satisfy fans hungry for fresh archival treasures. Even if it remains stylistically straightforward and avoids deep musical analysis, it emerges as an engaging, often disarmingly honest portrait of a former Beatle navigating reinvention. And if you tally up the output from that supposedly uncertain decade, you’ll find at least twenty indestructible songs — many of them fully the equal of, and occasionally superior to, those he once wrote with a little help from his friends from Liverpool.
