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Trailer for "The U.S. vs. John Lennon"

In the early 1970s, Esquire magazine ran a piece imagining what various celebrities of the day would be like as old people. Accompanied by drawings imagining them as octogenarians, it broke them into two categories: good old people and bad old people. In the latter category was Barbra Streisand, drawn as a Margaret Dumont-ish dowager dripping with jewels and kvetching endlessly about her ailments.

In the former category was John Lennon, drawn as a mischievously grinning leprechaun (think Barry Fitzgerald). The writer imagined him as a chainsmoking prankster, the kind of old guy who never tires of asking grandchildren to pull his finger.

Of course, Lennon was killed at the age of 40, barely old enough to start worrying about touching up his hair. For anyone who came of age in the 1960s, it’s hard not to think about what he might be up to were he still with us. Despite the entertainment industry’s efforts to sanitize his memory since his death (those love song compilations sell so much better than his primal scream and political albums, no doubt), I’m certain he would have a lot to say about the state of the world we live in.

If you think that the opinions of one more celebrity are the last thing the world needs, you’re too young to remember Lennon in his prime, when the Nixon administration regarded him as so dangerous that they put the FBI to work on getting him deported. You’re also the intended audience for The U.S. vs. John Lennon, a documentary which at its best serves to point out that resistance against a seemingly omnipotent government is not always futile.

For the most part, filmmakers David Leaf and John Scheinfeld are more subtle about the relationship they want to draw (between a government that tried to silence critics of the Vietnam war and a government that doesn’t want to hear any naysaying about its failures in the Iraq and the Middle East) than the quote by Gore Vidal that is being used in the film’s advertising, calling Nixon and George Bush agents of death.

Instead, they lay out a concise history of American involvement in Vietnam leading up to the height of the protest movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s. They also assume that you know enough about Lennon’s first band to keep Beatles history to a minimum, concentrating on his artistic development and his determination, fueled by Yoko Ono’s career in performance art, to do something useful with the absurd amount of celebrity he possessed. The filmmakers have dug up a good amount of seldom-seen footage, including the infamous “bag-ins” and “bed-ins” that so irritated the mainstream press of the day. And while the inevitable parade of talking heads includes some with little reason to be here, we also get to hear from such surviving political activists of the time as Angela Davis, Paul Krassner, Bobby Seale and John Sinclair, along with government and FBI officials of the time.

Leaf and Scheinfeld may have wanted to depict the activities of a man exercising a political and social conscience, but VH1, which co-produced the film, is predictably more interested in Lennon the object of boomer nostalgia, which is the film’s biggest weakness. There’s too much “Saint John” stuff, culminating in a predictably maudlin ending built around Mark David Chapman’s contribution to the Lennon story. The U.S. vs. John Lennon may not live up to its somewhat hysterical title, but it will prove a valuable history lesson to a lot of the people who may well be in need of one.