McCartney revisits the scramble after The Beatles

A museum Q&A with Morgan Neville put the hard landing of 1970, the Wings years and a lasting love for Lennon back under the lights — the film already streaming, the talk still direct.

Paul McCartney and director Morgan Neville attended a screening of the documentary Man on the Run at the Academy Museum in Los Angeles on 28 September and stayed for a question-and-answer session hosted by Judd Apatow. The evening placed McCartney with an audience to talk through the decade that opened when The Beatles ended and closed with the murder of John Lennon.

The film has been available on Amazon Prime Video. Neville’s cut follows McCartney from the breakup of The Beatles through the formation of Wings and stops in 1980. It draws on never-before-seen footage, archival material from Linda McCartney, and new interviews with McCartney, his daughters Stella and Mary, Mick Jagger, Denny Laine and other voices from family and the Wings years.

Sacked from the only job

At the screening McCartney described the rupture in plain language. He said he felt “sacked from the only job he had ever had”. The line lands because it is practical rather than romantic: an English musician from Liverpool whose working life had been the band, suddenly without it and with no obvious next move.

He took on critics who had dismissed his early solo work given the standards set inside The Beatles. He revisited the lawsuit that turned the end of the group into a legal fact as well as a musical one. He spoke about the Japanese prison stint that halted a Wings tour and became one of the most public episodes of those years. And he returned to his enduring love for Lennon — the friend and writing partner whose death in 1980 is the outer edge of the story the film tells.

None of it was offered as tabloid confession. The point of the night, and of the documentary, was craft under pressure: how a player who had lost the only job he knew set about inventing the next one in public, on record and on the road.

The second act on film

The Beatles, the English band from Liverpool, disbanded in 1970. What followed for McCartney was the long, uneven labour of starting again — writing, recording and touring under a new name, with a new line-up, while the shadow of the old group never quite left the room. Man on the Run treats that labour as the centre of the frame rather than a footnote to the Sixties. Wings are not a side note; for most of the running time they are the story.

Linda McCartney’s archive supplies photographs and film that have not circulated widely before. Stella and Mary McCartney add family testimony. Jagger, speaking from another of the great English rock institutions of the same generation, and Laine, who lived the Wings years from the inside, widen the circle. The result is less a victory lap than a working account of how the post-Beatles life was built day by day, under scrutiny and often under fire.

Interest in that stretch of the career has not cooled. The Academy Museum evening sat in the same current: the film already in homes, the conversation still live, the subject still ready to answer for the choices of the Seventies.

The Los Angeles date was not a launch. The documentary had already been streaming for months. What it supplied was McCartney and Neville in the same room as the audience, walking back through 1970 to 1980 with the finished film as the prompt. For listeners who know the records, the tours and the cover versions of that era, the value lies in hearing the man who made them set the terms himself — the sacked feeling, the critics, the lawsuit, the prison cell, and the love for Lennon that outlasted both the band and the decade.

That is where the story stands now: a finished documentary still finding viewers, and its subject still willing to narrate the scramble that began when The Beatles stopped.