The Killing of John Lennon

‘I was nobody until I killed the biggest somebody on earth.’ These were the legendary words used by Mark David Chapman, the murderer of John Lennon in 1980, to summarise himself. The Killing of John Lennon is a bloodcurdling and detailed portrait of Chapman. The film was shot over a period of three years at the original locations on the basis of extensive research and is based on Chapman’s statements and diary fragments that offer the viewer no rest in an effective voiceover.
Having grown up in Hawaii in fairly poor surroundings, Chapman developed into a young man filled with latent aggression that could also not be contained by his Japanese-American wife. A visit to the local library introduced Chapman to the protagonist from J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, who turned against phonies. The discrepancy between Lennon’s phrase ‘imagine no possession’ and his opulent lifestyle blows the fuses in Chapman. He decides to travel to New York to rid the world of Lennon.
Chapman is convincingly played by Jonas Ball in this impressionist yet balanced thriller-like biographical film that shows the thin line between idolisation and psychosis. At the same time, the film provides a picture of America within which the unbridgeable distance between hero and admirer has led to murder more than once. (EH)