The film offers what the title promises—an explication of Lennon's burgeoning social conscience and public activism, and his eventual harassment for it by the FBI and U.S. immigration service, which attempted to deport him from his Manhattan home ostensibly for a years-old British marijuana charge. It takes its sweet time arriving there, however, and in structure and tone is pure VH1 (the network's Rock Docs wing co-produced with Lionsgate). This means lots of dizzying aural and graphic flourishes, a plethora of rare archival footage and few scenes that last over 30 seconds, making for an addled, ADD-inducing experience. It also means that the narrative is propelled by talking heads—Yoko Ono among them, naturally, as well as Lennon's colleagues (though, curiously, none of his surviving ex-bandmates), admirers and, to directors David Leaf and John Scheinfeld's credit, a few detractors who remain opposed to the musician's politics.
The problems with this approach are familiar to anyone who's seen Behind the Music. The filmmakers' whole-cloth acceptance and application of the Lennon-as-martyr legend creates a general feeling of airlessness, as if the impulse to capture the dramatic arc of his burgeoning political awareness left no room for narrative flexibility or the exploration of possible moral equivocation—the stuff of genuine human drama, and of the best documentaries. The result is frequently mawkish and oddly conservative, attributes Lennon likely would've loathed.
What allows The U.S. vs. John Lennon to transcend these shortcomings is, of course, Lennon himself. Whether he's holding forth from the stage of a benefit concert, bantering with the likes of Bobby Seale on The Mike Douglas Show or defending his right to be politically engaged to incredulous journalists (including the New York Times' sublimely condescending Gloria Emerson), he comes off as probing, refreshingly blunt, keenly attuned to his status as enlightened clown and, above all, utterly convinced of the rightness of his cause. In this regard, Leaf and Scheinfeld's decision to lead with seemingly extraneous and overused biographical information proves canny: It conveys the degree to which Lennon, a spottily educated blue-collar kid, truly struggled to understand the times in which he lived, and it puts his responses to those times in—of all things—an illuminating class context. If a poor, unloved near-orphan could grow up to put his hard-earned privilege on the line for peace, what's stopping the rest of us?
This hardly makes for a well-rounded portrait of Lennon—a more diligent documentarian willing to deflate a few cherished myths is required for that. But it's an impressive stroke for a film that otherwise succeeds in spite of itself.