by Tom Williams

Christopher Eccleston, the only Doctor Who to sport a shaved head and a shouty Northern demeanour, carries his own baggage. In other words, he is not an actor to disappear within the part, although he tries his best in Lennon Naked (BBC4) as the hero John. His accent is pretty well spot-on, and even his posture, arms down by the sides while hair gathers over stiff shoulders, effectively mimics Let It Be-era Lennon. The same cannot necessarily be said for his band mates: Andrew Scott labours a Paul McCartney caricature with hopeless exaggerations – a gormless mouth, lazy boggle eyes, the drawl between each line – while the presentations of George and Ringo are merely, well, hairy Liverpudlians.

Eccleston’s big problem, and one which the critics will no doubt pounce upon, is his age. He is a good decade older than Lennon during the period covered in the film, or at least, he looks it. Yet in many ways Eccleston’s wearied looks are employed by the writer and director to their advantage. The film begins in black and white, the mop-top Lennon being chased by the gaggle of screaming girls who hide around every street corner in every Beatles biopic. Eccleston’s looks, in turn, hide behind large sunglasses. It is only when Lennon is reunited with his father, engineered in some shady hotel suite, that Eccleston removes the specs, and the lined face emerges. And, for the rest of the film, this works. For this is now John Lennon at his most weary, dragging himself through familial confrontations and rock band ruptures.

Lennon is shown as a nasty type, abandoning wife and son for the bizarre, impassive Yoko Ono. His nastiness is supported by his coldness of expression, as Eccleston speaks in a punchy monotone, occasionally loudening with rage but essentially sticking to the same note. If I’m Not There showed the indecipherable quality of Bob Dylan through a host of different actors with different takes on the artist, Lennon Naked aims for the same effect through a surface portrayal, a single image of a deeply unstable man who nevertheless, in his voice and body, seems to keep it all together, even when engaging with tribal chanting with Ono. It is only in the final five minutes, as Lennon undergoes therapy and childhood reminiscence, that the top blows off and a shaky, crying boy awakes.

Lennon wants rebirth, hence getting naked, but the idea of rebirth in the film is bound up with the idea of childhood regression. Lennon is infantile: he enrages his wife by jumping into their pool fully clothed; he demands his boyhood friend Pete Shotton move into the family home; he sits cross-legged before the divorce lawyer, a mix of mystic and schoolboy. The film continually flashes back to a boy on the pier; it is the same story of parental abandonment covered in Sam Taylor-Wood’s Nowhere Boy.

Satisfactory enough. But a revealing line in the film was Lennon’s to Ono, after their screaming session: “I haven’t let rip like that since Hamburg”. It’s a jarring reference to a period which isn’t covered, or even captured, in Lennon Naked, the pre-Epstein days of leather jackets and rocking out “like animals”. Eccleston’s age may have placed limitations on the film stretching so far back, but it seems to provide a curious ellipsis within the film’s chart of Lennon’s development. Lennon rants to a reporter that he’s “grown up” since the days of “A Hard Day’s Night”; the reference reminds us that after Lennon the child came Lennon the rocker, Lennon the Beatle who probably wished he’d been in The Rolling Stones. Lennon Naked is weakened then, because, for all the layers it peels away to reach Lennon’s childhood trauma, it skips over the period of constant, merciless gigging which, according to Malcolm Gladwell in his book Outliers, formed their genius. Like Lennon, the film averts its eyes from this chapter, and we are only left to imagine what the brutal, early John might have looked like.

by Tom Williams