Mostly British Film Fest: Looking for Lennon

To understand The Beatles—and what made John Lennon the man he was—you have to understand Liverpool, the city that gave birth to Lennon and The Fab Four. Director Roger Appleton’s documentary is a Liverpool focused retrospective on the early life and times—and traumatic events—that went to shape Lennon’s complex personality and influence his later songs and music. It reveals—with painful candor—how Lennon was an “outsider” from birth and how it impacted his schooldays and teenage years. And how it ultimately drove him to form his first group, The Quarrymen, then led to his early embrace of rock ‘n’ roll and his meeting with fellow rock ‘n’ roll mad Paul McCartney.