Imagine: John Lennon

Plot

Liverpool, the 1940s and 1950s. John Lennon (in home movies and archive footage) is a boy raised by his strict Aunt Mimi after his mother, Julia, drifts out of his daily life. He falls for skiffle and American rock and roll just as the port city is importing the records, and the film follows him from schoolboy skiffle bands into the Cavern Club, Hamburg, and the explosion of Beatlemania. The early Beatles material is the familiar recap, but it is stitched with home-movie footage never staged for a camera, which gives the rise a casual, family-album texture the concert clips cannot.

Then come the years the mythology tends to blur. Lennon meets Yoko Ono, and the two become inseparable, provoking fury in fans and press who blame her for the Beatles' end. The band breaks up, and Lennon's solo life begins with the peace campaign: the bed-ins for peace in Amsterdam and Montreal, where he and a visibly pregnant Ono sit in bed for a week while journalists file in to mock or argue with them. In one of the film's most-quoted confrontations, the conservative cartoonist Al Capp barges into the bed-in and expresses his disdain in no uncertain terms, and Lennon and Ono give as good as they get⁵.

The film's eeriest stretch is a home-movie sequence in which Lennon reads aloud a letter predicting his own assassination. "I believe there will be an attempt to assassinate you," he reads, "the spirit that gave me this information was Brian Epstein," the letter attributing the prophecy to the spirit of the Beatles' dead manager⁶. He reads it calmly, almost amused, in footage shot years before the shooting the audience knows is coming. The film has the nerve to let that sit without comment, and it is the moment most people carry out of the theater.

The other remembered confrontation is quieter and crueler in a different way. At Lennon's English country estate, an avid fan shows up on his porch seeking answers to life, hoping the man who wrote the songs can supply them. Lennon, gentle but firm, tells him, "Don't confuse the songs with your own life"⁶. It is the film in miniature: the artist who wrote "Imagine" refusing, to a stranger's face, the very worship the stranger is offering.

The New York years bring the political trouble. Lennon fights the US government over his immigration status, and in a 1971 interview segment a New York Times reporter questions his sincerity in denouncing British politics and returning his MBE medal, an argument Lennon conducts with a mix of wounded pride and steel⁶. Then comes the retreat: five years away from music, raising Sean in the Dakota apartment, the househusband years, and finally the return to the studio in 1980 for Double Fantasy. The film shows the title song in its embryonic stages, Lennon singing "Imagine" first for friends and then for his backup musicians, a song being born on camera⁷.

The ending is handled with deliberate restraint. The murder outside the Dakota on December 8, 1980 is not dramatized; the film gives the aftermath, and the shock arrives through silence, the voice that has been talking for nearly two hours suddenly gone. "In My Life" plays over the end credits⁷, and the effect is devastating, because the film has spent its runtime establishing how hard-won the man's final contentment was.

Characters

John Lennon (archive footage) is the film's only real presence, appearing at every age from the leather-jacketed rocker to the round-glasses househusband. He narrates his own story through decades of interviews, and he is an unusually candid subject: funny, vain, savage, and sentimental, often within the same answer. The film preserves his contradictions rather than sanding them off.

Yoko Ono (archive footage) appears as partner, collaborator, and fellow target of the press, from the bed-ins to the Dakota years. She made her personal archives available for the film for the first time since Lennon's death⁸, and the film stays largely inside Lennon's own account of the marriage, with Ono present mostly as beloved partner rather than as a person with her own version of events.

The supporting cast of the archive includes Aunt Mimi Smith, ex-wife Cynthia, sons Julian and Sean, and bandmates and journalists who drift through the footage⁹. None of them are positioned to push back on the subject; the film has no interviewer willing to ask the second question.

Interpretations and controversies

The single-perspective approach was noted at the time. The Los Angeles Times called it at its best a sensitive tribute and at its worst a hero-worshiping whitewash⁹. Director Andrew Solt insisted the aim was a balanced portrait, "not an idealized vision of St. John of Liverpool"¹⁰, and the filmmakers acknowledged the film was made in the shadow of Albert Goldman's notorious critical Lennon biography in bookstores, countering its accusations without naming them⁷. Because Ono cooperated and supplied the archives, some critics saw the film as the family's authorized version, gentle on the cruelty Lennon himself admitted to in interviews.