Cannes Review: Steven Soderbergh’s John Lennon: The Last Interview Is a Breezy, Inessential Documentary

“We feel like this is just the start now, you see? I feel like nothing happened before today.” –– John Lennon

It’s strange that Yoko Ono isn’t mentioned in the title of John Lennon: The Last Interview, given that she’s part of the conversation, but I suppose they couldn’t have called it “The Last Interview” if she were. Regardless, Steven Soderbergh’s new documentary hinges on a 1980 radio chat with the storied couple, about the storied couple, and in anticipation of their first album together in five years: Double Fantasy. It was the only interview they gave for it.

It took place at The Dakota—the famed co-op for Manhattan’s upper echelon on West 72nd street on the skirt of Central Park—where they lived, mere minutes after an Annie Leibowitz photoshoot in their apartment. David Geffen, who was repping John and Yoko, set up the long-form conversation with three KFRC San Francisco journalists whose verbal contributions to the film add some solid context but whose presence onscreen in talking-head interviews is the cinematic equivalent of being cornered at a party by someone who wants to impress you with a celebrity story you didn’t ask to hear about. 

Much of the conversation is centered on John’s transformation from his rockstar phase in the early ‘70s to his desire to become a father, family man, and good husband who unashamedly loves his wife, something the two agree had warped into a national rarity, if not an embarrassment, in the culture of 1970s married life. Yoko goes so far as to call John “courageous” for proudly, openly loving his wife and investing in fatherhood. The interview is also a near-comprehensive oral history of John and Yoko’s relationship, specifically between 1973-1980, a period in which John fell apart and came to embrace accountability as a man with women.

They talk about how it took them 18 months to ever get physical in the first place because John didn’t know how to operate “with a woman who demanded equal rights from the word go.” They detail, in frank agreement, how Yoko kicked him out of the house (“Yoko said, ‘Get out.’”) for being “macho,” as she calls it, and misogynistic in 1973. John thought that it was cool, that he was free. He finally had a chance to live his bachelor life, something back-to-back marriages had stripped him of while with the Beatles.

Alas, he chronicles that period as the most miserable of his life. (“I needed her more than she needed me, and I’d always thought the boot was on the other foot.”) After years of loveless sleeping around, he learned his lesson—having no one to care for or truly love him sucked his soul empty until he came crawling back to Yoko, who was willing if he reconsidered his stance in the relationship, something John was eager to do.

They talk about the evolution of music from golden oldies to the ’60s rock ‘n’ roll revolution to disco to new wave and so on, John professing his love for all of the above and waxing poetic about the ways we find all of them in each other, each style a noticeable influence that remains relevant to the people writing the music, regardless of what’s trending. John reminisces on hearing The B-52s’ “Rock Lobster” for the first time and shouting, “That’s Yoko!” when the gargling shriek section pops off. The two talk about not touching music for the five years leading up to the album—something that once defined their lives had become decoration. “I hadn’t taken my guitar off the wall from behind our bed in five years.” 

Both of them are wide open in the interview—kind, candid, and generous with what they offer the giddy journalists about their personal and professional lives. At one point, John details a day in the life of him, Yoko, and their son Sean, which largely consists of John being a stay-at-home dad and Yoko working around the clock in the office downstairs, occasionally passing through for John to make her a coffee if she has time in between her litany of international calls. John is as animated as ever and as goofy as it seems he’d be behind closed doors, but it doesn’t get in the way of him getting real. He holds the two in perfect balance.

He expresses his abounding love for Sean and passion for raising him day-to-day, one he felt more encouraged to brandish after Burt Reynolds, sex symbol of the 1970s, came out as a proudly monogamous family man and committed father in a widely publicized TV interview. John doesn’t make Sean watch PBS because he has an issue with the much more popular cartoons on other channels but because he refuses to let Sean be inundated with commercials selling sugary products that convince kids they need them. The way he talks about Sean makes the impending tragedy of his death that much more tragic. Whether as musician, father, husband, or all three, John Lennon clearly had so many good years left.  

Thankfully, Soderbergh and company had the rights to Beatles and John/Yoko music, which means nearly all 100 minutes of this breezy but inessential doc are filled to the brim with great songs, including those from Double Fantasy. As Yoko informs us, the album was meant to bring men and women together, especially those in committed partnerships. “We want to reach each other, hold each other, and become human again.” For them, it was about trying to get to the uncensored as much as possible instead of projecting on one another. “I realized men had problems, too, which was a big, significant education for me,” Yoko says humbly.

The film has garnered an array of negative press (and on-the-ground buzz) for its deluge of silly AI footage used to supplement the absolute gold mine of archival footage that constitutes most of the movie. The criticisms are both accurate and overwrought. Most of the time, it is not too distracting. The images are sometimes fine, but linger too long, repeating themselves in droll sequences. Occasionally, it even comes off quite nicely. Overall, there isn’t enough recoiling AI to render the project moot. But when it is bad, it’s bad.

Take, for instance, the cringe-inducing dump of clips of hot, model-esque cavemen wearing leopard-print tunics (in a setting much like the opening of 2001: A Space Odyssey) who flex their disgustingly giant muscles and wink sensually at the screen like they’re in a perfume ad as they grunt and groan (it overlays a section in which they talk about John’s macho misogyny). How and why it ended up in the finished film is a baffling oversight on Soderbergh’s part that couldn’t be in poorer taste. If he’d have stuck with the trippy flowers and light portals morphing into one another in what amounts to one of those 10-hour YouTube videos people watch when they’re on LSD—a drug that owes a good deal of its popularity to the embrace and evangelism of the Beatles—the negative press on the AI footage may not have the same tinge of outrage.

John Lennon: The Last Interview is a minor work in the canon of both Soderbergh and John/Yoko, but it’s a niche wellspring of hyper-detailed information for Beatles purists. Boomer dads—still stuck on the long-debunked myth that Yoko broke up the band—will likely stage an inconsiderable boycott of the film as they do anything that heavily involves and/or paints Yoko in a good light (a lesson they’ve somehow yet to learn in the 46 years since John’s assassination). For the rest of the Beatles’ still-sweeping fandom, this interview will prove fascinating.

John Lennon: The Last Interview premiered at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival.