If it's possible to be anointed a saint without religious backing, John Lennon has earned that honor many times over. Founder of the Beatles, creative genius and spokesman for peace, assassinated in the prime of life—Lennon's story is the stuff of legend. But today, Lennon's fans tend to focus on his music and his death, ignoring the man in favor of the image.
Veteran music documentarians David Leaf and John Scheinfeld make an effort to fill that gap with ""The U.S. vs. John Lennon,"" a film that examines how Lennon became the face of the anti-war movement and a political threat to the Nixon administration. The most comprehensive Lennon film since 1988's ""Imagine,"" it's an informative yet incomplete look at an era that tends to get glossed over.
Leaf and Scheinfeld follow Lennon through his first stirrings of revolution with the Beatles, to his expanded worldview upon meeting Yoko Ono and his decision to use his fame to promote peace. Lennon's notorious moves—the bed-in for peace, ""War is Over"" posters and the benefit concert for John Sinclair—are covered, along with the increasingly hostile political climate in the United States.
To its credit, the film does not portray Lennon as the inspiration behind the anti-war movement. Rather, it shows that Lennon and Ono were simply idealists who got caught up in the storm, pushed into leading roles by radicals like Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman. It was their featuring him at freedom rallies that brought the FBI down on him, and led to the suggestion by Senator Strom Thurmond that expelling him from the country would shut him up.
The film is backed by a surprising diversity of interviews. Ono supplies the personal details of her husband's iconoclastic struggle, but Lennon is given historical depth thanks to a flood of experts discussing the political climate he was working in. The crowd includes politicians George McGovern and Mario Cuomo and journalists Carl Bernstein and Walter Cronkite, and even Nixon aides G. Gordon Liddy and John Dean chip in to discuss how they monitored Lennon's activities.
Of course, the main reason to see the film is for the archival footage of Lennon, which ""Imagine"" and ""The Beatles Anthology"" proved fans can never be satiated by. There's a wide variety of John and Yoko's anti-war statements and touching home movies of the two of them, but the real treat is watching Lennon spar with the press.
He offers flippant comments such as ""time wounds all heels"" in regard to Nixon, curses out a New York Times reporter for not liking his music and declares he will form a new country (Newtopia) to gain diplomatic immunity in his immigration battle. It's these simple and honest scenes that are the film's strongest moments.
Unfortunately, history's tendency to beatify Lennon comes through with historical omissions from the film. The Beatles are ignored save some performance and press conference footage, which paints Lennon as the one member who dared to say something substantial. There's no mention of the messy divorce with his first wife, nor any of his estrangement from Ono in the middle of their immigration battle.
Those holes aside, the film does what it promises: to show Lennon's battle for peace in the world and in his own life. ""The U.S. vs. John Lennon"" may not be his definitive biography, but it fills in some holes that have been long looked over—and there's still enough of Lennon's message shining through to make viewers flash the peace sign right back at the screen.
