‘John Lennon: The Last Interview’ Cannes Review: Soderbergh Captures an Irreplaceable Voice

The interview is great. The film, not so much. That could be a tidy summary of John Lennon: The Last Interview, the documentary Steven Soderbergh has built around the literal last interview Lennon ever gave — a session with a group of San Francisco radio journalists, with Yoko Ono by his side. No one could have known that just a few hours later, after leaving the Dakota and heading to the studio and back, he would be shot dead.

Loose, relaxed, free from any obligation to give safe, rehearsed answers — with the sole condition from the producers that no one ask about the Beatles — John and Yoko talked for over an hour about their life together: their daily routines, their years out of the spotlight, how they were raising their son Sean, their tastes, their shared experiences, and their sense of how the world had shifted from the sixties to that moment in 1980.

When they did look back, it was mostly to talk about how their relationship began and their earlier, more public and politically active years, with the Beatles mentioned only as much as absolutely necessary. Even with that unspoken restraint, the conversation — almost certainly re-edited, with answers rearranged — feels fluid, open, and unhurried: everything any journalist could hope for from someone as famous as Lennon.

But does any of that make a film? Or would a well-produced podcast have done the job just as well? Watching The Last Interview, I find myself genuinely unsure. In Soderbergh’s favor, there is a wealth of intimate photographic material from Lennon’s private life that brings us closer to the man and his world. He also draws on dozens of songs from Lennon’s solo catalog, along with brief snatches of covers and Beatles tracks — though in every case the clips feel frustratingly short. Curiously, there is no moving image footage of the two of them at all: everything is still photography, which feels more like a deliberate creative choice than a limitation. The film also includes interviews with the three original journalists, now in their seventies, who recall that day with a quiet emotion that makes complete sense — it’s a day none of them will ever stop carrying.

The real problem is the use of artificial intelligence to illustrate certain remarks by Lennon, song lyrics, or passing reflections. Not only are many of these AI-generated images ugly and unpleasant to look at, they’re deployed with a kind of blunt literalism — as though each one needs to directly represent whatever Lennon or a lyric has just said. The moments where animation is used instead work considerably better, and it’s a shame Soderbergh didn’t lean more heavily on that approach to fill the visual gaps left by a radio interview.

If you can make your peace with some of the more frustrating aesthetic and editorial decisions from the director who took the Palme d’Or at Cannes back in 1989 for sex, lies, and videotape, there is genuine pleasure to be found in The Last Interview — pleasure that comes entirely from Lennon’s own eloquence. It’s a reminder of everything that was lost the night he died: a sharp, funny, self-aware, ruthlessly perceptive man who also happened to be one of the greatest songwriters this planet has ever produced.