McCartney’s 'Man on the Run': A Great Story Lost in the Blur

Amazon Prime dropped a new Paul McCartney documentary yesterday, and I sat down with sky-high expectations and a large beer. Two hours later, I emerged confused, sober with a half-empty mug, and the nagging sense that someone had been handed a great story and decided to make a mood reel instead. 🎬Problem #1: the working title alone—Man on the Run—points directly at one of music’s most dramatic origin stories: the Band on the Run album, recorded in Lagos, Nigeria in 1973 under conditions that would have broken a lesser artist. Three of the five scheduled musicians quit the night before rather than travel to Africa. McCartney boarded the plane anyway, along with wife Linda and the ever-loyal guitarist Denny Laine. His job: make a miracle comeback album with a band that no longer exists. Then he nearly died from a bronchial spasm in the studio. Then armed robbers stole the master tapes at knifepoint on a Lagos street. Then Fela Kuti accused him of coming to steal African music.And then Paul made one of the best albums of his career.That story has everything—desperation, reinvention, physical danger, creative triumph against impossible odds, and sweet vindication. It practically writes itself. If you gave that material to a competent documentary filmmaker with access to the man himself, you should end up with something extraordinary. 🎙️What we got instead is... different. The Band on the Run drama didn’t get much treatment during the film’s two hours.I watch a lot of films, and I have a habit of pausing the video every now and then, just to see how many remaining minutes there are. Every once in a while, a great film stops me from doing that—because I don’t want to know how many minutes are left, I don’t want things to end. During Man on the Run, I paused the video way more than usual. And each time, I could hardly believe how much time was still remaining.Blurry Images and Missing FacesThe doc opens dreadfully slow, with meandering landscapes and practically no narration. In fact, there are no on-camera interviews except from some old Beatles clips that we’ve all seen dozens of times. I suspect that many casual fans will stop watching during that slow buildup. Quite a bit of time is devoted to McCartney’s strained relationship with John Lennon during the 1970s, but there is virtually no mention of George Harrison or Ringo Starr at all, which seemed odd.Here is the thing that irked me more than anything: The quality of the archival footage (and there’s a lot of it) is shockingly poor. Apparently, no attempt was made to restore the film, to upscale it to make it sharper, or even to brush the dust and dirt off it. And unless I’m mistaken, some passages were deliberately fuzzed up even more, making them even grainier. I suppose that was an artistic choice, but a couple of times, the picture was so bad I feared I was losing my Internet connection.The Second Viewing was BetterI watched the film again this morning, and actually enjoyed it much more on the second viewing. I guess my expectations had fallen back to earth. The film had been so hyped for so long, I was expecting much more drama.To be fair, Man on the Run is not without its pleasures. Watching anything about Paul McCartney for two hours is not a hardship. The man remains one of the most naturally compelling subjects in music, and even a documentary that doesn’t quite know what to do with him benefits from his presence. There are moments that land. There are glimpses of the story that should have been the whole film.But those glimpses make the absences more frustrating, not less. Every time the film approached the Band on the Run material with something resembling depth—the Lagos sessions, the chaos and improvisation that produced an album McCartney’s detractors still have to reckon with—it pulled back. Subject changed. More fuzzy footage. 🎸The professional critics have been kinder to the film than I have. Variety's Chris Willman—one of the most respected music critics in American journalism—praised the film's energy (though he rightly noted that McCartney's off-camera voiceovers sounded more like a series of voicemails than a proper visit.) Kevin Maher of The Times gave it four out of five stars, praising director Morgan Neville for standing back and allowing the archive material to do the heavy lifting—but he pointed out there are "no revelations, just a warm and cozy restatement of cultural history." NPR gave it a thumbs-up. The film currently sits at 100% on Rotten Tomatoes from 44 reviewers. So perhaps the consensus is that Man on the Run delivers exactly what it promises—just not quite what I was hoping for. 🎬The VerdictAm I telling you not to watch Man on the Run? Of course not. A world will never exist in which I recommend skipping a Beatles-related film, even the ones that stink. You should watch it. Paul McCartney is worth two hours of anyone’s time under almost any circumstances, and...