Review: The U.S. Vs. John Lennon

John Lennon may have believed in the idea of peace, but he wasn't exactly a peaceful man. He had a stormy temperament and was famously quick to boil. One of the most revealing moments in the new documentary The U.S. Vs. John Lennon is a replay of the Montreal bed-in confrontation between Lennon and New York Times reporter Gloria Emerson. She pushes past the flowery, junket-like atmosphere and takes aim, accusing him of being more or less a stooge of the anti-war movement. Lennon's gut response is to turn nasty. His small eyes become fixed and feral, his shoulders hunch over, as if he's preparing for a roll in the Liverpool dust of his youth. It's the kind of scene that would be at home in a truly critical look at the man behind the music. Unfortunately, the makers of this film had something different in mind. Directors David Leaf and John Scheinfeld have clearly cut a devil's bargain here, accepting a 'Yoko-approved' stamp on every frame of their film in exchange for unfettered usage of the Lennon catalog.

The trade-off has some benefits. Even if you're turned off by the hagiographic nature of the doc, which makes hero-worshipping hay out of some Watergate-era chicanery to get Lennon's U.S. visa revoked -- surely the least of the Nixon's regime's misdeeds -- you can still sit back and relax to a generous sampling of Lennon's post-Beatles hits. Instead of interviews with family members, old band mates and friends, the filmmakers have assembled a collage of notable radicals from the 1960s. Some are dead, and some are living. There's Bobby Seale, the Black Panthers founder who encouraged his minions to use food money to buy "a gun a week." He seems to have spent the last 30 years near a McDonald's drive-in. Famed burglar G. Gordon Liddy is on hand, along with his mustache, to contribute his two cents on the Lennon mystique. The saga of activist Fred Hampton is revisited; Noam Chomsky makes a brief appearance to accuse the F.B.I. of having murdered him. You get the idea.

The film also spends an unfortunate amount of time on the saga of John Sinclair, an activist who was arrested for selling marijuana to an undercover cop and given a lengthy prison sentence. Lennon organized a concert on his behalf and wrote a song about him. It's catchy, like even Lennon's toss-offs usually were. "It ain't fair, John Sinclair ... in the stir for breathing air." Shortly after the song circulated, Sinclair's conviction was spontaneously overturned. This supposedly prompted a re-evaluation on the part of the feds as to Lennon's potential as a public agitator. They began to view him as a threatening pied-piper; a man with instant-mix credibility with American youth, who the anti-war activists like Abbie Hoffman would obviously try to recruit. Incidentally, the only John Sinclair story I knew before this film was one that's not discussed here; Hoffman also tried to make headlines on behalf of Sinclair by storming the stage of a Who concert to protest his imprisonment. When he wouldn't leave, Pete Townsend brained him with his guitar.

Was the Nixon administration really having high-level discussions about the John Lennon situation? The film paints it as more of a coalition of the willing; Senator Strom Thurmond apparently wrote a letter to Nixon's right-hand man, H. R. Halderman, suggesting the scheme of mucking up Lennon's visa-renewal in order to make him go home. J. Edgar Hoover is also assumed to have played some role in the affair, although the film doesn't make his involvement very clear. There are lots of presumptions and veiled accusations, without a true indictment ever being presented. Gore Vidal is wheeled out at one point to sum the whole thing up for us, in case we haven't got the message: People who want war have to get rid of people who want peace, and that's all we need to know about Lennon's situation, he tells us. At times the grand case that's being made, of a deliberate right-wing attempt to do harm to Lennon, comes off about as coherent as the 3:00 a.m. ramblings of a bunkered-in-the-basement pothead.

The picture that emerges of Lennon in the film is of a man thrust to the center of a national storm at the same time he's battling to establish his own identity, free of the other Beatles. A man capable of extraordinary poetry, in both music and words, and also capable of extraordinary silliness. At one point we see a gaggle of news reporters surrounding what looks like a Halloween ghost under a bedsheet. It's John and Yoko, demonstrating "total communication," which has something to do with heightened awareness that comes from sensory deprivation. Lennon also publicly indulges in Yoko's "music of the mind" conceptual art and other such piffle. (Yoko's frequent appearances in the film as an on-message talking head are unnecessary and boring.) At other times during the film, however, Lennon tries to make it clear that all of his wacky stunts were part of a plan to cash in his celebrity for something he thought was greater. "Americans always ask showbiz people what they think," he says with a winking smile, at one point. I'd like to see a whole documentary devoted to exploring what was underneath that smile.