Sir Paul McCartney’s new film is the most human look at the Beatles legend yet

It’s not quite Beatlemania 2.0, but The Beatles are enjoying a big Gen Z ‘moment’ right now. 

In 2025, The Fab Four won the Grammy for best rock performance (despite not performing together since 1969), with their AI-enabled, UK number 1 hit single Now And Then also nominated for record of the year. 

Meanwhile, the massively anticipated film series, The Beatles – A Four-Film Cinematic Event, co-starring hot young talents Harris Dickinson, Paul Mescal, Joseph Quinn and Barry Keoghan respectively as John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr, is in full swing and scheduled for a 2028 release. 

Further proof that, in the five decades and counting since they split, The Beatles remain an inescapable cultural phenomenon. 

A bummer if you were the one man determined to escape them.

That’s the thrust of Man On The Run, a fascinating new doc from Oscar-winning filmmaker Morgan Neville (20 Feet From Stardom) which specifically focuses 1970-80, the period when Paul decided to quit the biggest pop band in world ever (though here he asserts it was John who had secretly left first) – then had to figure out what on earth to do next.

‘What are your plans now?’ a reporter asks. ‘A holiday? A musical? A movie? Retirement?’ Paul’s answer was simple: ‘To grow up.’ So he retreated to a small, genuinely modest, unheated, tumbled-down Scottish farm in the ‘end of nowhere’ with his wife Linda and their two small kids and attempted to get back to basics.

As rock and roll legends go, it’s not your typical story.

At the end of 1969, Paul disappeared so conclusively that there were consistent news reports of his death. But, as this doc endearingly reveals, through gorgeously intimate, previously unseen archive footage and diaries, as well as new (off-screen) interviews with Macca and others, the 27-year-old was actually coming back to life.

It was a rocky road. Mocked as the ‘uncool’ Beatle, Paul’s more amusing artistic attempts included recording a trippy version of Mary Had A Little Lamb and RAM, an entire LP inspired by his love of sheep, which this doc attempts to reclaim as a misunderstood work of genius. You may remain unconvinced.

Eventually, Paul returned to the only thing he’d known since the age of 15: starting a band from scratch. He first formed Wings with his beloved late wife, Linda, a New York photographer who gamely went on the road with him and what evolved into their four little kids in tow, without any help, even a cook or a driver, as her daughter Stella later marvels. This was truly another celebrity era – the Beckhams, they were not.

No matter that Linda couldn’t really sing or play an instrument, ‘Here’s middle C – you can play keyboards, ’ Paul told her. Together, accompanied by a varying line-up, Wings went from playing grassroots gigs for 50p a ticket to becoming one of the biggest bands of the 1970s, while playing out Paul’s fantasy of normalcy.

A fantasy because, as Geoff Britton, one of a revolving door of Wings’ drummers, points out: ‘You weren’t really normal and equal because he’s a world superstar and you’re a dog-faced nobody.’

That’s a rare negative perspective in what’s very much a #TeamMacca film – and was in fact executive produced by him. Even so, it’s a lovely, very human portrait of a man, not an icon. Who, like the rest of us, had to brave himself to try and fail and try again, in order to keep on moving on.

Paul McCartney: Man On The Run is in cinemas from February 20 and available on Prime Video from Feb 27.

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