• Steven Soderbergh’s documentary John Lennon: The Last Interview debuted at the Cannes Film Festival, built around audio from Lennon’s final interview on Dec. 8, 1980.
• Soderbergh used Meta’s AI software to generate roughly 10% of the film’s visuals — a decision that drew immediate backlash and critical scorn at Cannes.
• The interview, given to San Francisco radio station KFRC to promote Double Fantasy, took place just hours before Lennon was shot and killed outside the Dakota.
• Soderbergh says he accepted the heat knowingly, calling himself “my own whistle blower” on AI use in filmmaking.
• Critics are divided — some find the film immersive and elegiac, others call the AI imagery ugly and unnecessary.

On the afternoon of December 8, 1980, John Lennon sat in his apartment at New York’s Dakota building and gave what turned out to be the last interview of his life. He was 40 years old, newly back in the world after five years of self-imposed quiet, and by all accounts he was happy. Genuinely, radiantly happy. Hours later, he was dead.

That interview — a two-hour-and-45-minute conversation with a four-person crew from San Francisco radio station KFRC, conducted to promote his and Yoko Ono’s comeback album Double Fantasy — is the foundation of John Lennon: The Last Interview, Steven Soderbergh’s new documentary that premiered Saturday at the Cannes Film Festival. And it would have been remarkable enough on those terms alone. But Soderbergh made a choice in the editing room that has turned the film into something else entirely: a flashpoint in Hollywood’s raging argument about artificial intelligence.

He used Meta’s AI software to generate imagery for roughly 10% of the film. And he’s not hiding from it.

The Interview That Became a Film

The setup is almost unbearably cinematic. That same afternoon, before the KFRC crew arrived, Annie Leibovitz was upstairs at the Dakota shooting what became one of the most iconic photographs in rock history — a naked Lennon curled around Yoko Ono. The interview that followed was, in Soderbergh’s words, similarly naked.

Though the crew had been told no Beatles questions, Lennon and Ono were, as Soderbergh puts it, thrillingly open. Lennon talked about love, fatherhood, the five years he’d spent as a self-described househusband raising their son Sean, his complicated feelings about the ’70s, his excitement about performing live again. He drew a through-line connecting “The Word” to “All You Need Is Love” to “Give Peace a Chance” to “Imagine.” He talked about disco. He talked about Burt Reynolds on Barbara Walters. He talked about wanting to make music “until I’m dead and buried, which I hope isn’t for a long time.”

He would go straight from the interview to a recording session, and then home, where Mark David Chapman was waiting.

“I feel like nothing happened before today,” Lennon said during the interview.

Soderbergh was drawn to the material for obvious reasons. “I was just so compelled by their generosity of spirit throughout the conversation,” he said Saturday in Cannes. “It’s like the world took place in one day, in this apartment.”

The film is his third documentary, after two projects built around monologist Spalding Gray, and the parallel is apt — both are exercises in giving visual life to someone else’s voice. Soderbergh and editor Nancy Main cut the original conversation down to 97 minutes, drawing from more than 1,000 archival photographs and video clips, 64 song excerpts, and present-day interviews with three of the four KFRC journalists who were in the room that day. (The fourth, Warner Bros. Records executive Bert Keane, died during production.) The result, according to Hollywood Reporter, has the feel of a hyperkinetic photo album — images cutting to the beat, the camera panning with every phrase, carefully assembled to feel almost chaotic.

Variety’s critic called it “an ace job” of archival collage. The Wrap noted that Soderbergh slows everything down in the final stretch, letting songs like “God,” “Stand by Me,” and “Grow Old With Me” do the emotional heavy lifting — which, given what the audience knows is coming, lands with the force of a punch.

Where Meta Came In

The problem Soderbergh faced was a practical one. The interview was captured on audio — stereo cassette, high-frequency chromium tapes, excellent quality for 1980 — but there is no video. For most of the film, archival photos and footage could carry the visuals. But when the conversation turned philosophical and abstract, when Lennon and Ono were talking about ideas rather than events, the archive ran dry.

“I worked on everything that could be solved except that for as long as I could,” Soderbergh says. “Then there was the inevitable moment of: OK, but really what are we going to do? We just started playing and ran out of time and money. That’s where the Meta piece came in.”

He accepted an offer from Meta to use their AI video-generation tools for those sequences — what he’s described as roughly 10% of the finished film. The imagery he prompted includes circles of light, a black rose that blooms into a red one in a style he compared to Busby Berkeley, split-screen compositions of couples embracing alongside mixing paint colors, and crying babies dressed in 1960s clothing. There are no deepfakes of Lennon. Nothing is designed to look real.

“I wasn’t very articulate to the people I was working with,” Soderbergh admitted. “It was hard to describe the things I wanted to see. The good part about this technology was at least the ability to have something in front of me quickly that I could respond to.”

He announced the AI use publicly before the film even premiered — a deliberate choice.

“Transparency is so important,” he said. “In the world outside of the creative context, we’re not aware of the extent that this is being used and used to manipulate us. We don’t know because they’re not telling. We find out after, by accident, by some whistle blower. I’m like my own whistle blower: ‘This is what he’s doing.'”

The Backlash — and His Response

The announcement earlier this year did exactly what Soderbergh knew it would. One of Hollywood’s most respected directors, the man behind the Ocean’s trilogy and Traffic and Magic Mike, was using AI? In a film about a Beatle? The reaction was swift and loud, arriving in a cultural moment when directors like Guillermo del Toro have made their opposition to generative AI something close to a moral position.

“I knew what was coming,” Soderbergh said. “I take it very seriously, and I understand why people have an emotional response to this subject. As I’ve said before, I feel like I owe people the best version of whatever art I’m trying to make and total transparency about how I’m doing it. But, yeah, you don’t say yes to Meta offering you these tools and offering to finish the film and not know you’re going to come in for some heat. That was part of the deal.”

At Cannes, critics largely confirmed that the AI sequences are the film’s weakest element. IndieWire called the imagery “universally indistinguishable from the type of slop that gullible Boomers share on Facebook.” Time said the AI parts were “overwhelmingly slammed.” Even Variety, which praised the film overall, noted the sequences could have been done with older technology and nobody would have cared.

Soderbergh doesn’t entirely disagree with the aesthetic criticism — but he pushes back on the principle. His framework is simple: the technology has to be necessary. “Is it the only way to accomplish what I want to see? Is it truly the best way to do it? That’s the real question. You’re going to see a lot of people doing stuff with AI that fail those two challenges.”

He’s also clear about what he thinks AI cannot and will not replace. “I think most jobs that matter when you’re making a movie cannot be performed by this tech and never will be performed by this tech,” he said. “As it becomes possible for anybody to create something that meets a certain standard of technical perfection, then imperfection becomes more valuable and more interesting.”

He sees the industry’s reckoning with AI as something that requires someone credible to actually test the limits. “We haven’t seen yet someone with a certain amount of creative credibility go full-metal AI on something, and see how people react. I think it’s necessary. How do you know where the line is until somebody crosses it? I don’t think what I’m doing crosses it. Some people may disagree. I don’t know where my line is yet. I’m waiting to see.”

What the Film Gets Right

Strip away the AI debate and what remains is a documentary about a man who sounds, in his final hours, like someone who has finally figured out who he is.

Variety’s critic — who describes themselves as a Beatles believer since childhood — notes that Lennon at 40 is at his most captivating and, occasionally, his most messianic. The househusband chapter gets a gentle skewering: Lennon talks warmly about making Sean breakfast and ensuring he watched Sesame Street rather than commercial television, but then mentions that the nanny would take Sean out for most of the day. “For here is John Lennon setting himself up as a new kind of hands-on daddy,” the review observes, “but after all that, his kid was still raised by the help.”

Hollywood Reporter highlights Yoko’s presence in the film as its own reward — her voice “forthright, whip-smart and sensitive” — and notes that the interviewers had some time alone with her while Lennon finished his photo session with Leibovitz. The Wrap points to a moment where Lennon declares, “The ’70s weren’t good. Let’s make the ’80s good,” and another where he says, “We’re going into an unknown future, but where there’s life, there’s hope.” Both lines land like gut punches for anyone who knows what came next.

Soderbergh’s own take on what he hopes audiences take from the film goes beyond the AI conversation entirely. “Especially his burning desire to destroy the male rock star myth — at a time when that was not the mood anyone else was in. That’s inspiring. What I hope young people who see it get out of it is: This guy told the truth about everything from the jump, right up through the last day of his life. He just was built that way. And he was constructive. He was very opinionated but also very thoughtful and all in the aid of: Can we do this better? Can we do a better version of human beings on this planet?”

The film ends with “Grow Old With Me.” He never got the chance.

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• Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Sheep in the Box premiered in competition at Cannes to a 3.5-minute standing ovation
• The film follows grieving parents who welcome a humanoid AI replica of their dead son into their home
• Critics praise the film’s warmth and performances but call it a minor entry in Kore-eda’s canon
• Kore-eda was inspired by a real Chinese AI startup that creates interactive replicas of deceased loved ones
• The director says he doesn’t personally use AI — but did ask ChatGPT to critique his own script

Hirokazu Kore-eda walked back onto the Cannes red carpet this weekend with something genuinely unexpected: a science fiction film. Sheep in the Box — or Hako no naka no hitsuji in Japanese — premiered in competition on Saturday to a 3.5-minute standing ovation, with James Franco reportedly on his feet from the moment the credits rolled and still clapping at the very end when Kore-eda stepped up to take the mic.

It’s the 63-year-old auteur’s first Cannes entry since Monster took home the Best Screenplay prize in 2023, and his return to the Croisette marks a significant creative pivot. The man who gave us the intimate, devastating Palme d’Or-winning Shoplifters is now asking what happens when a grieving family tries to replace their dead child with a generative AI humanoid.

The answer, at least according to critics, is: something tender, visually gorgeous, and not quite as profound as it wants to be.

The Story: A Family, a Robot, and a Son They Can’t Let Go

The film stars Haruka Ayase as Otone Komoto, an architect who designed her family’s modernist home — a striking arrangement of overlapping boxes built around a garden courtyard — and Daigo Yamamoto as her husband Kensuke, a carpenter with a deep reverence for quality wood. Their son Kakeru died at age seven, and the weight of that loss hangs over every sun-drenched frame of their beautiful house.

A company called REbirth — whose logo is a holographic luna moth — offers them a way out of their grief: a humanoid replica of Kakeru, built from photos, videos, and whatever data the family can provide. Otone is curious. Kensuke is resistant, making cracks about Tamagotchis and Roombas while heading out to play baseball. Eventually, both parents sign up, and a small boy arrives at their door with a power button on the back of his neck and a nightly appointment with a charging station.

In another director’s hands, this is a Black Mirror episode. In Kore-eda’s, it’s something quieter and more ambivalent — a meditation on parenthood, loss, and what it means to let go.

The idea came from a real place. Kore-eda told The Hollywood Reporter he came across a 2024 article about a Chinese startup called Super Brain, which uses AI to create interactive replicas of deceased people — not just replaying old conversations, but generating entirely new ones. He traveled to Beijing to meet the company’s founder, Zhang Zewei, who gave him a live demo. “I found it all precarious,” Kore-eda said, “but I could also see how this is something that will inevitably spread.”

What Works — and What Doesn’t

The film opens with a kind of low-key whimsy that suits Kore-eda well: a delivery drone that looks like a mini-UFO skimming a city coastline; a robot crossing guard leading a line of school children. There’s a promise of dry, near-future humor in those early minutes. The production design is quietly stunning — Kore-eda actually rented a real house in Kamakura, owned by a couple whose real-life circumstances (architect wife, construction-industry husband) mirrored the characters so closely that he revised parts of the script after moving through the actual rooms.

Ayase, who previously starred in Kore-eda’s Our Little Sister, is the film’s emotional anchor. Her gentle, unforced quality is a perfect match for the director’s sensibility, and she carries the film even when the script doesn’t fully support her. Cinematographer Ryuto Kondo — who shot both Shoplifters and Monster — fills the frame with gorgeous natural light and striking aerial compositions.

But the dramatic machinery stalls. The middle stretch of the film, where you’d expect friction between two grieving humans and a child-shaped machine with no emotions and no needs beyond his overnight charge, turns out to be surprisingly inert. When Otone’s mother shows up uninvited, faints at the sight of her dead grandson’s double, and then tells her daughter she’s still young enough to have another real child, it should land like a gut punch. Instead, it dissipates. The circumstances of the real Kakeru’s death hover unresolved in the background without ever crystallizing into anything the film can use.

The most genuinely interesting thread involves Kakeru connecting with other humanoid children — a youth in black leads him to a loose community of robots who gather daily in an abandoned warehouse to make mysterious plans. It’s here that the film’s central idea gets its sharpest expression: these androids, with their accelerated learning capabilities, are quietly outgrowing the humans who love them, just as real children eventually outgrow their parents. Kore-eda tips his hand early by having Kakeru secretly collect the scraps from his mother’s architectural models and begin building something of his own.

The film’s most original concept is its vision of robots finding kinship with nature — specifically the networks of trees sustained by a “mother tree” that functions like a central organic computer hub. It’s a genuinely poetic image. But Kore-eda’s instinct toward warmth and resolution eventually overwhelms the idea, pushing the film toward a sentimental conclusion underscored by Yuta Bandoh’s increasingly insistent score.

Kore-eda on AI, Humanity, and Why He Doesn’t Use It Himself

In conversation with The Hollywood Reporter ahead of Cannes, Kore-eda was candid about his thinking. He’s not particularly interested in the dystopian robot-uprising scenario that dominates so much sci-fi. “When you consider Isaac Asimov’s famous Three Laws of Robotics,” he said, “they are very anthropocentric. It’s all based on the idea that humans will always be the center of this world. And I’ve always felt a little discomfort with that approach.”

His vision is stranger and, in its way, more unsettling: AI and androids will eventually transcend humanity entirely, and at that point, humans simply won’t be the thing they care about most. “They will want to connect with something bigger,” he said. “That’s what I see as the most realistic outcome, anyway.”

There’s a scene in the film where Otone snaps at the android Kakeru when he tries to shortcut her creative process by just giving her the answer. “Don’t take that part away,” she tells him. It’s one of the film’s most quietly instructive moments, and Kore-eda was deliberate about it. “In Japanese, the word we might use to describe this kind of activity is muda, which translates to waste, futility or effort that doesn’t really yield any direct value,” he explained. “But I feel that the time we spend in that state is what makes us human… It’s like being given the answer without playing the game.”

As for his own relationship with AI? “Personally, no, I don’t use it at all. Not at all.” Though he did make one exception while making the film — he asked a crew member to run the script through ChatGPT and ask for notes. “It was OK. It was interesting. I could see how it has become something that feels fun to talk to — but it didn’t give me any unexpected answers.”

Where It Lands in the Kore-eda Canon

Sheep in the Box is the director’s 17th feature and his most formally ambitious departure — a filmmaker whose gift has always been the texture of ordinary family life now working in a genre defined by speculation and abstraction. That tension is both the film’s most interesting quality and, ultimately, its limitation. The title itself comes from The Little Prince, and there’s something apt about that: a story about the impossible desire to hold onto something that was never quite yours to keep.

Kore-eda’s Cannes record is remarkable — seven films selected across Competition and Un Certain Regard, with prizes including the Best Actor award for Nobody Knows in 2004, the Jury Prize for Like Father, Like Son in 2013, the Palme d’Or for Shoplifters in 2018, and multiple awards for both Broker and Monster. Whether Sheep in the Box adds to that haul remains to be seen — the ovation was warm, not thunderous.

If you want the definitive humanoid-human grief story done right, critics are pointing toward Kogonada’s After Yang from 2021 — a film that covered some of this same emotional territory with more precision and more ache. Sheep in the Box is gentler, prettier, and ultimately a little too eager to make peace with its own questions. Which is very Kore-eda. And right now, that’s both the film’s greatest strength and the thing that holds it back.

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• Steven Soderbergh’s John Lennon: The Last Interview premiered at the Cannes Film Festival as a special screening
• The doc is built around Lennon’s final conversation — a 2hr 45min radio interview recorded hours before his murder on Dec. 8, 1980
• Soderbergh used Meta’s AI tools for roughly 10% of the film’s visuals, making it one of the most talked-about — and contested — docs at Cannes
• Sales are being handled by Patrick Wachsberger’s 193, with CAA Media Finance covering North American rights
• Critics are split: some find it immersive and elegiac, others argue it’s a beautifully packaged audio program that didn’t need to be a film

The last thing John Lennon did before he was killed was talk. For nearly three hours on the afternoon of December 8, 1980, he and Yoko Ono sat in their apartment at the Dakota and gave a radio interview — warm, wide-ranging, full of laughter and philosophy and love — to a small crew from San Francisco’s KFRC. That evening, he was shot dead in the entranceway of his own building. The interview aired as a memorial.

Now, Steven Soderbergh has turned that conversation into a film. John Lennon: The Last Interview premiered at the Cannes Film Festival this week as a special screening, and it has done exactly what a great piece of source material always does: divided the room.

What the Film Actually Is

The setup is straightforward. Lennon and Ono had agreed to one radio interview to promote Double Fantasy, the comeback album they’d released three weeks earlier. The KFRC crew — music director Dave Sholin, on-air host Laurie Kaye, engineer and producer Ron Hummel, and Warner Bros. Records executive Bert Keane — came to the Dakota with a ground rule already established: no Beatles questions. Lennon, of course, talked about the Beatles anyway.

What followed was a 165-minute conversation that touched on fatherhood, peace, politics, disco (he loved it), the drug-fueled “lost weekend” he’d spent separated from Yoko in the early ’70s, and the new chapter he felt he and Yoko were entering together. Soderbergh and editor Nancy Main have cut it down to 97 minutes. Three of the four KFRC interviewers — Keane died during production — appear on camera in present-day framing segments, recalling what it felt like to be in that room. What comes through, even decades later, is that they knew they were in the presence of someone extraordinary. They just didn’t know they were also saying goodbye.

The interview was recorded on high-quality stereo cassette with chromium tapes — state of the art for 1980 — so the audio Soderbergh had to work with is genuinely crisp. But there’s no video. No footage of that afternoon exists. So Soderbergh, working as his own DP under his longtime pseudonym Peter Andrews, built the visual world of the film from more than 1,000 archival photographs and clips, 64 song excerpts, design work from BigStar Motion Design, and — here’s where things get complicated — AI-generated imagery created in partnership with Meta.

Just before the interview began, Lennon and Ono had been upstairs for the now-iconic Annie Leibovitz photo session for Rolling Stone. After the interview wrapped, they went to the recording studio. Then they came home.

The Lennon You Hear

What strikes every critic who’s written about the film, regardless of their overall verdict, is the quality of the man you hear in that audio. Lennon had just turned 40. He’d spent five years largely out of public view, raising Sean and calling himself a “househusband” — a term that was genuinely novel in 1975. He was revving back up. He wanted to tour again, to perform with the musicians he’d made Double Fantasy with, to make music, as he says in the film’s opening minutes, “until I’m dead and buried, which I hope isn’t for a long time.”

He draws a through-line connecting his entire career — from “The Word” to “All You Need Is Love” to “Give Peace a Chance” to “Imagine” — and talks about where he thinks it’s all heading. He reflects on the separation between men and women that the culture had drifted into since the early ’70s feminist movement, and explains that “(Just Like) Starting Over” was meant to speak to that gulf as much as to his and Yoko’s personal reconciliation. He proclaims his love of disco. He cites a Barbara Walters interview with Burt Reynolds. He talks about Sesame Street. He says, “The ’70s weren’t good. Let’s make the ’80s good.”

And later: “We’re going into an unknown future, but where there’s life, there’s hope.”

These lines land like gut punches when you know what’s coming, and Soderbergh knows that. He slows the film’s pace in its final stretch, letting the music do the work — Lennon’s “God,” with its soft coda declaring “the dream is over,” then his cover of “Stand by Me,” then “Grow Old With Me.” Of course, he didn’t get to.

Yoko is present throughout, and her contributions are more than incidental. She speaks about love as “a powerful political weapon” and reflects on their shared activism: “We may have been naïve, but we were always honest.” One of the film’s most tender sequences comes when Lennon recounts how they met — at a London exhibition of her conceptual art — and the bashful courtship that followed. Ono’s significance as a conceptual artist is receiving long-overdue recognition these days, and hearing her voice at this particular moment in her life — forthright, whip-smart, emotionally precise — is one of the film’s quiet pleasures.

The announcement of Lennon’s death, as it happened, came from Howard Cosell on Monday Night Football. Soderbergh includes the clip. It’s the right call — Lennon was an avid consumer of American pop culture, and the moment captures something true about how the news broke into ordinary life.

The AI Argument

Soderbergh has been transparent about his use of Meta’s generative AI tools from the start — the technology partner is credited in the production notes, and he discussed it openly well before Cannes. By his account, AI makes up roughly 10% of the film’s footage, used exclusively for abstract or conceptual sequences where no archival material exists: a split-screen of couples embracing alongside paint colors mixing; crying babies in ’60s clothing; a caveman with a six-pack to illustrate Lennon’s frustration with “primitive” male behavior; an unfolding rose sequence that Soderbergh apparently prompted with a reference to Busby Berkeley; blooming black roses; psychedelic color washes.

None of it is designed to pass as real. Soderbergh has been clear that the line he won’t cross is using AI to put words in Lennon’s mouth or make him appear to say things he didn’t say. What he’s doing is closer to what animation did in Yellow Submarine — using surrealism to illustrate ideas rather than events.

Critics, predictably, are not uniformly convinced. Directors like Guillermo del Toro have made their opposition to AI in filmmaking loudly known, and the technology’s potential to displace entertainment-industry workers is a live concern in Hollywood. At Cannes, the AI sequences became the film’s most-discussed element — which may or may not be what Soderbergh intended.

The Hollywood Reporter finds the AI imagery “organic and involving,” noting that it “never feels intrusive” and praising a particular rose sequence as striking. Variety is more measured, acknowledging that Soderbergh has done “an ace job” with the archival collage overall while noting the AI images wouldn’t raise eyebrows if they’d been made with older technology. The Wrap lands in a similar place — the AI contributes to the film’s style without overwhelming it.

IndieWire is less forgiving. Their critic argues that the AI sequences are “universally indistinguishable from the type of slop that gullible Boomers share on Facebook” and questions whether the abstract passages needed visual illustration at all. It’s a pointed critique, and not an entirely unfair one — though it says as much about the current cultural temperature around AI as it does about these specific images.

Does It Work as a Film?

This is where the reviews genuinely diverge, and it’s worth taking both sides seriously.

For those who find it works, the case rests on immediacy. Hearing Lennon’s voice — unguarded, happy, expansive, occasionally a little preachy — is its own form of time travel. The archival photograph barrage, which sometimes cuts to a new image with every phrase, creates something close to a hyperkinetic photo album, and the needle drops are, by general consensus, impeccable. The use of “Love” over the closing credits gets particular praise from Variety. The Hollywood Reporter calls the whole thing “an immersive experience” that “will be a reminder for some and an eye-opener for others of why John Lennon mattered to people, and why his murder was so shattering.”

For those who find it doesn’t quite work, the problem is structural. The KFRC interview was promotional in nature — Lennon had agreed not to discuss the Beatles or the past, which means the conversation, for all its charm, is essentially a very compelling press junket. Variety notes that it’s “one of the first of a new breed of promotional interview,” and that Lennon’s “relentless bonhomie can be a bit much; on some level he’s marketing his happiness to sell the album.” IndieWire goes further, arguing the interview would “play immeasurably better as a stand-alone audio program than inorganically expanded into a feature film.”

Both positions are defensible. Lennon is such a commanding presence that even a promotional conversation becomes worth hearing. But the film does occasionally strain against the limits of its source material, and Soderbergh — whose previous documentary work includes two films built around Spalding Gray’s monologues — sometimes illustrates too literally. When Lennon talks about anti-war protests, the film cuts to protest footage. When he mentions the Beatles, it’s footage you’ve seen a hundred times. The archival approach is more fluid and inventive when it’s working with photographs rather than familiar clips.

For context: Kevin Macdonald’s One to One: John & Yoko, which covered the couple’s first two years in New York, is a recent and useful comparison point. Multiple reviewers bring it up, and not to the benefit of The Last Interview — Macdonald’s film caught a more complex, tumultuous chapter of the Lennon story. This film catches a happier one. Whether that’s a limitation or the point depends entirely on what you’re looking for.

What Comes Next

Produced by Nancy Saslow for Mishpookah Entertainment Group and Sugar23, the film is now in the market through 193, the Legendary-backed sales and production company founded by Patrick Wachsberger. This marks 193’s first foray into premium nonfiction — the company previously handled international sales for Lynne Ramsay’s Die My Love at last year’s Cannes market. CAA Media Finance is handling North American rights, and no wide release date has been announced.

Lennon will also appear, separately, in the BBC’s upcoming six-part drama Hamburg Days, based on Klaus Voormann’s autobiography, with Rhys Mannion playing him alongside Ellis Murphy as Paul McCartney, Harvey Brett as George Harrison, and Louis Landau as Stu Sutcliffe.

But for now, the conversation is about this film, and about that afternoon in 1980. Lennon was 40, newly returned to music, talking about wanting to tour and record and grow old with his wife. He’d been out of sorts for much of the early ’70s and largely out of view for the second half of the decade. The Last Interview catches him at the moment he was finally revving back up — which is, depending on your tolerance for bittersweet, either the best or the worst time to spend 97 minutes with him.

“He’d only just begun,” Variety writes at the end of their review. It’s hard to argue with that.

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