Man on the Run (World screen premiere, in person: Morgan Neville)

Morgan Neville: Man on the Run (US 2025) featuring Paul McCartney.

Jason Silverman (TFF 2025): "In one of the most surprising sequences yet seen in a music biography, Paul McCartney, then 28 years old, is fixing up a remote, dilapidated Scottish farmhouse. He tends to sheep, cuddles with his wife, Linda, and their two little girls, and plays music in the barn into a four-track recorder. Morgan Neville (TWENTY FEET FROM STARDOM, WON’T YOU BE MY NEIGHBOR?, PIECE BY PIECE) offers a new take on one of history’s most documented humans, overturning much of what we’ve learned about Sir Paul (who served as executive producer). With full access to Paul’s journals, Linda’s wonderful photos and the notoriously evasive man himself (who sat for seven interviews), Neville provides a stirring, sharp-eyed and deeply pleasurable corrective to the standard McCartney narrative (no, he didn’t break up The Beatles!). We take a journey with a thoughtful, endlessly inventive soul who, post-Fab Four, challenged himself to grow up." –JS (U.S., 2025, 115m) In person: Morgan Neville

    Viewed at Palm, Telluride Film Festival, 30 Aug 2025

AA: Morgan Neville's Man on the Run is an authorized film portrait of Paul McCartney after the breakup of The Beatles, doing justice to Linda McCartney, providing a first person narration by Paul himself, and giving us access to a treasure trove of private family archives.

To me, the movie emerges as a perfect counterpart to Kevin Macdonald and Sam Rice-Edwards's One to One: John & Yoko (GB 2024), one of the best movies of last year. It was the story of John Lennon and Yoko Ono after The Beatles, also with lots of previously unseen material and setting the recording straight with Yoko. Both wives were at the time victims of misogynist abuse.

The Beatles had been a case of a "once in a millennium chemistry", not only an act hard to follow but impossible. John and Yoko diversified in different directions, including social engagement. Paul and Linda followed the example of Rousseau: "back to nature". They became sheep farmers in Scotland and focused on family life. They were active in music, too, but the band was inseparable from family.

Paul was happy to be free from a dependence of people's praise. He didn't care about style or stylists and flaunted on being uncool, even in bad taste. "We invented Spinal Tap" he says. He continued to create great original music but also enjoyed playing "Mary Had a Little Lamb" and "You Are My Sunshine".

The film itself is a celebration of ordinary family life. But no family is ordinary.

Man on the Run belongs to a contemporary trend of creating non-fiction from extremely checkered material. McCartney revelled with lo-fi in music, and the same goes for the visuals. It's a collage and a compilation from footage that is often visually awful, but the hectic edit makes us forget that. It is a mosaic puzzle. It aspires to the condition of animation.

Besides correcting the record of Linda, Man on the Run is also important in doing justice to Paul and John. John Lennon finally admitted that Paul had been right all along about Allen Klein, the crook who tried to rob the Beatles fortune. In this film we have a definitive account of Paul's reaction to the murder of John Lennon. They had just made a reconciliation. John's death was such a devastating blow to Paul that it was beyond words for him to register it in public.

"And in the end... " We don't hear the last words in the movie, but we know them by heart: "the love you take is equal to the love you make".