PLOT: After The Beatles’ breakup, Paul McCartney starts a new band, Wings, which is initially received poorly by critics but sells millions of records.
REVIEW: We’ve gotten a whole lot of documentaries about The Beatles over the last few years, with Disney+ having given us the definitive Get Back, along with newly refurbished versions of The Beatles Anthology. John Lennon has gotten a couple of good documentaries, and George Harrison got a brilliant two-part doc from Martin Scorsese (Living in the Material World), leaving Ringo and Paul somewhat overlooked. Now, Paul’s post-Beatles career gets some overdue attention in Morgan Neville’s Man on the Run. Not meant to be exhaustive or definitive, rather than tackle McCartney’s entire career it focuses on one pivotal period, starting with the breakup of The Beatles and ending with Paul’s decision to scrap Wings, the band he headed throughout most of the seventies.
Much of Wings’ discography gets lumped in with Paul’s solo work, which is understandable, but for quite a while they were distinctive, with their work markedly different from what Paul did with The Beatles—which was the intention. The band consisted of Paul on lead vocals and bass guitar, his wife Linda McCartney on keyboards, and Denny Laine on guitar, along with a revolving slate of musicians who played in different eras of the band. While a lot of their work is considered classic now, with Band on the Run usually regarded as one of the best albums of the decade, critics in the seventies did not take kindly to Wings. Nor did John Lennon, who often criticized McCartney’s output (although not as vehemently or cruelly as people sometimes misremember).
Neville’s film features extensive interviews with McCartney, his daughter Mary, surviving members of the band, as well as Sean Ono Lennon—all presented in voiceover, with no talking heads. The documentary dives into Wings’ complicated history. It’s fascinating, as it does a good job showing just how harshly the public turned on Paul in the aftermath of The Beatles, particularly in the UK, where his American wife, Linda, was viewed as some kind of interloper (much the way Yoko Ono was by others). McCartney sets the record straight here, insisting John was the one who ended the band and defending the early solo work that was attacked by critics. One such example is his now-classic album Ram, which is ardently defended by Sean Lennon, who also uses the documentary to open up about the fact that Lennon, toward the end of his life, still followed McCartney’s career, owning a well-played copy of McCartney II, which came out not long before he died.
The documentary isn’t as much of a deep dive into Wings as I was hoping for, with Neville’s film clearly designed for an audience who may not know much about the band. It’s also far less about their music than McCartney’s state of mind at the time, with some of the classic singles like “With a Little Luck,” “Goodnight Tonight,” and “Live and Let Die” not getting much attention. Yet it’s interesting to hear how the critical reaction to Wings still strikes a nerve with McCartney, especially regarding how the late Linda McCartney was treated (she was actually a great keyboard player, in my opinion). It also examines exactly why Wings ended, with its demise not coincidentally coinciding with John Lennon’s murder, with Sean Lennon unpacking the way the narrative around McCartney’s reaction to his death was spun. McCartney also sets the record straight, admitting he and Lennon had reconciled shortly before his death, and that at its worst their relationship was nowhere near as frayed as the press made it seem.
In the end, Man on the Run isn’t the definitive McCartney solo-era documentary I would have liked (it would have needed to be as long as The Beatles Anthology), but it’s still a very welcome addition to the canon of Beatles documentaries. Now someone needs to give Ringo his due too.
