Whether it’s possible to make a documentary on Paul McCartney without feeding John Lennon quotes in remains a mystery. Man on the Run, despite being a cobbled-together fact-finding mission from director and documentarian Morgan Neville, pulls at the Wings thread as though it were a tertiary project from McCartney. Man on the Run may possess a fascination with the band, but Neville’s documentary, much like the subject himself, is not keen to discuss certain parts of his decade with Wings. For a band whose career trajectory seemed unsure until their third album and then questionable afterwards also, neither Neville nor McCartney reflects at all on why that could have been. They put it down to being in the shadow of The Beatles but that feels insincere. There was and still is, in a way, more at play than one group following another. Man on the Run is a chance for McCartney to tell all about his experiences in setting up a new band, in trying to outperform a career high, and he doesn’t tell it.
Part of the problem is how much ground Man on the Run has to cover, and how little of it feels all that necessary. Mick Jagger talks about how he can’t fix a roof, Sean Ono Lennon pops up to reminisce about his father’s attitude to music making. There’s a note or two of How Do You Sleep?, and some nice footage from the Imagine documentary, but none of it feeds into the story of Wings. It’ll paint a rough portrait of Ram, but that’s all. Man on the Run gets lost in the context, rather than the detail, of its most important moments. Even then, for how nice it is to hear from Denny Seiwell and Linda McCartney, archival tapes and interviews naturally, their words offer very little. A personable picture is painted, a clear reason for McCartney to start a band is founded, but it all feels very brief and hardly ever presents a depth expected of its subject or the works they made. Man on the Run can’t find the time to talk through London Town but it can reserve the last ten minutes of the documentary for a shoddy glimpse into the final days of Lennon and McCartney’s relationship.
What becomes evident from this Neville documentary is he, and McCartney by extension, are keen to rehash what’s already known. For those wanting a depthful look at a fascinating creative decade for McCartney, keep looking. This is what the most passive listener will already know, drummed up as the hard facts and highlights of Wings. Back to the Egg is seen more as a footnote that McCartney still hasn’t made peace with rather than anything else, and while Live and Let Die may be on the soundtrack, it hardly registers as a moment in Wings’ discography worth celebrating. Mull of Kintyre is thrown in as almost an apology for forgetting about it in the first place. Man on the Run is an all over the place documentary, darting back and forth to make sure all these McCartney approved talking points are touched on. It does a good enough job of that, but it feels aimless.
Little nuggets of interest can be found, though. In those sparse moments where McCartney reflects on how The Beatles’ break-up affected him, there’s a sense of genuine loss about him. He truly had no idea what to do, how to fashion his way through. Man on the Run may not have much going for it where new information or sincere reflection on the deep cuts is concerned, but when there’s a chance to hear McCartney discuss the uncool persona he adopted throughout the 1970s, when rock and roll was a tool of revolt, it pieces a few Wings essentials together. There’s a sense of understanding which comes through and that, for Neville at the very least, appears to be the aim. Man on the Run cannot ever, truly, figure out what sort of film it wants to be. It bounces between a Paul and Stella romance, a Lennon-McCartney fallout, and a straight documentary of how Wings came to be. It does none of that at all well, but it’s at least watchable.
