SLIFF 2014 Review – RUBBER SOUL

RUBBER SOUL screens as part of the 23rd Annual Whitaker St. Louis International Film Festival on Saturday, November 22 at 4 PM at Stage at KDHX. For ticket information go here

Director Jon Lefkovitz has made an interesting documentary/ dramatic hybrid with his cinematic interpretation of two interviews with John Lennon and Yoko Ono conducted ten years apart. In both sequences Lennon is played by Joseph Bearor and Ono by Denice Lee. The 1970 interview, just months after the break-up of the Beatles and prior to the release of the first plastic Ono Band record albums, with Rolling Stone magazine publisher Jann S. Wenner (Dillon Porter) takes place in an austere wood-paneled meeting room. In September of 1980, mere months before his assassination and prior to the release of the album “Double Fantasy”, the duo sit down at the kitchen table in their NYC Dakota apartment with Playboy magazine interviewer David Sheff (Andrew Perez). Lefkovitz cuts back and forth between the two settings with Lennon giving contradictory answers to many similar questions as Ono generally looks on. Helping to provide chapter settings and bookmarks between subjects are brightly colored graphics and vintage photographs along with newsreel and archival footage of his early life with and without the rest of the “fab four”. For fans of those classic tunes and the artists behind them, RUBBER SOUL is an engrossing look at one of the twentieth century’s most influential icons.