Movie Review: 'Man on the Run' chronicles Paul McCartney's post-Beatles
long and winding road
[February 25, 2026]
By JAKE COYLE
If Peter Jackson’s “The Beatles: Get Back” was the supreme document of
the Beatles’ final moments together and of their dissolution, Morgan
Neville’s “Man on the Run” is a kind of sequel.
It begins in late 1969, just months after Savile Row rooftop concert.
The Beatles have broken up. Paul McCartney has seemingly disappeared.
There are even rumors that he’s dead. On a remote farm in Scotland, a
confused and distraught McCartney wonders whether he’ll write “another
note, ever.”
But the most surprising thing about revisiting this tumultuous,
tabloid-ready period of McCartney’s life is a simple fact. When the
Beatles broke up, McCartney was 27 years old. To say he had lived a
lifetime by then would be an understatement. By just the sheer enormity
of their production and colossal cultural impact, you might easily
mistakenly put McCartney in middle age by then.
“Man on the Run,” premiering Friday on Prime Video, is the story of
everything that came after. McCartney, an executive producer, is never
seen sitting for an interview, but his off-camera musings mark the
movie, a chronicle of self renewal. For McCartney, kept boyish by the
Beatles, the band's end meant a sudden coming of age.
“I had to look inside myself and find something that wasn’t the
Beatles,” McCartney says in the film.
How you feel about McCartney’s post-Beatles career might inform how you
feel about “Man on the Run.” For Neville, the celebrated documentary
filmmaker of “Won’t You Be My Neighbor,”“Piece by Piece” and “20 Feet
From Stardom,” it’s a period that offers no neat narrative, but — quite
unlike the mythic Beatles years — something more like the ups and down
of life, with regrets and triumphs along the way.
It didn’t get off to a good start. McCartney, blamed for the Beatles
breakup, was guilt-ridden. His first records were a disappointment.
Singing with Linda McCartney, his wife, wasn’t greeted well. A 1973 TV
special that included a rendition of “Mary Had a Little Lamb” was, to
put it a mildly, a misjudgment. A curious feature of McCartney’s largely
sunny disposition is a nagging self-loathing.
“If I hear someone damning Paul McCartney, I tend to believe them,” he
says, referencing the Beatles split.
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Paul McCartney, of Paul McCartney and Wings, performs at the Nassau
Coliseum in Uniondale, N.Y. on May 21, 1976. (AP Photo/Richard Drew,
File)
 “Get Back” offered a revelatory
window into the group’s dynamics that put many of the old views of
McCartney to bed. Comparisons are tough — “Get Back” is one of the
greatest docs of the century — but Jackson’s film, drawn largely
from footage shot by Michael Lindsay-Hogg, was also incredibly
intimate. It captured not only the band’s individual relationships
but the songwriting process in real time. (The emergence of “Get
Back” from McCartney’s strumming and humming stands as one of the
great sequences in documentary film.)
“Man on the Run” lacks that sense of closeness. By
keeping the film in archival — the documentary is full of family
photos and home movies — and without present-day talking heads,
Neville lets us experience McCartney’s post-Beatles years as he did.
It comes as a sacrifice, though, to a nearness to McCartney — and to
the creation of his solo songs — that might have deepened the film.
The real arc of “Man on the Run” is building toward the creation of
McCartney's first post-Beatles band, Wings. It’s in some ways an
unlikely centerpiece. In the revolving makeup of the band, Denny
Laine was the only permanent member outside Paul and Linda. On the
other hand, Wings’ “Band on the Run” is the best album McCartney
produced after the Beatles, and the clear culmination of years of
struggle. If you needed one, this is your cue to go play “Jet” loud.
It turns out, to no one’s surprise, it’s hard to move on after being
in the Beatles — especially for someone like McCartney who believed
so sincerely in the band. Like its subject, “Man on the Run”
inevitably pales next to films of the Beatles heyday. But it’s a
meaningful companion piece about the end of an era and the start of
a long and winding road.
“Man on the Run,” an Amazon MGM release, is rated R by the Motion
Picture Association for language. Running time: 126 minutes. Two and
a half stars out of four.
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