Documentary Review: 'Borrowed Time: Lennon's Last Decade'

Borrowed Time: Lennon’s Last Decade

Directed by Alan G. Parker

Written by Documentary

Starring John Lennon, Tariq Ali, Vinny Appice, Helen Anderson

Release Date April 7th, 2025

Published April 16th, 2025

Borrowed Time: Lennon’s Last Decade is a deeply emotional experience for Beatles fans. With Lennon having been elevated to the status of a God by his tragic death, the glimpses of the real Lennon, the charming, all too human and flawed Lennon, have become rare. I am not intending to criticize the deification of John Lennon as it is not some centralized, cohesive creation but merely the natural outgrowth of mass grief and parasocial coping. It’s natural for Lennon’s most beloved qualities to form a legend that becomes who John Lennon is in our collective culture.

Watching Borrowed Time: Lennon’s Last Decade we are invited back in time to New York City and Los Angeles in the early 1970’s to follow John Lennon as he battles to become an American citizen, struggles with drugs and alcohol, and even leaves behind Yoko Ono for a time, a part of his life that has only begun to be documented fairly recently. Only in the last few years could you search “John Lennon’s Lost Weekend” and find a series of articles and entire books about a year in the life of John Lennon that was missing from the deified, sanctified, legend of Lennon.

John Lennon’s Lost Weekend, a reference to the brilliant and sorrowful 1945 Billy Wilder film, The Lost Weekend, was actually an entire year where Lennon ran off to Los Angeles with his mistress May Pang and spent months enjoying his life in and out of the spotlight. He drank a lot, used heroin, and rediscovered himself as an artist, apart from Yoko whose influence had been such a big part of his post-Beatles music. This period also bursts with anecdotes both charming and alarming about the former leader of The Beatles.

One relatively famous anecdote shared in Borrowed Time tells the story of Lennon drunkenly being thrown out of the famed club, The Troubadour. Famously a bit of a troll before such a term became widely known, Lennon joined a group of friends at the popular nightclub and began heckling the main stage attraction that night, the comedy duo The Smothers Brothers. Did Lennon not enjoy the show? No, he was just drunk and trying to have some fun according to the talking heads of Borrowed Time. The owner of the Troubadour didn’t enjoy throwing a Beatle out of his club but Lennon is said to have taken his banishment in good humor.

You need to see the documentary for more details about this and other humorous, charming, and sad anecdotes, all of which work to bring Lennon back to humanity. It’s not taking him down a peg, this isn’t a takedown of the legend of John Lennon. Rather, it’s a loving tribute that aims to remind us all of the person we lost alongside the legend of our own creation that we lost when Lennon was brutally gunned down in December of 1980. Lennon’s death is a tragedy but we often forget that he was just a man who happened to have an incredible talent.

Borrowed Time: Lennon’s Last Decade brings the tragedy of Lennon's death to a remarkably human level with empathy and the kind of shared, cathartic grief that is so rare in documentary form. The final act of the documentary, covering Lennon’s final days, the recording of Double Fantasy and his tragic murder, is filled with familiar stories and less familiar insights regarding Lennon’s mindset in the final days and the ways his life affected so many people in so many expected and unexpected ways. It’s a fascinating portrait and one that I highly recommend.

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