Lennon Naked

At many points, though, it feels like a one-man stage production, with Eccleston taking long navel-gazing trips into Lennon's psychic anguish.

Despite the fact that the film focuses on just a few critical years of Lennon's life, the pacing is plodding and scattershot at the same time.

Eccleston, who lacks much of a physical resemblance to Lennon, certainly nails the biographical portrait, but Lennon Naked spends a lot of time probing around its subject's thin skin without exposing much that augments his legend. It's a movie with music as its foundation that hits occasional high notes but, ultimately, can't carry a tune.

He is so relentlessly bitter in Lennon Naked that, ultimately, his bitterness has no emotional weight. The script, by Robert Jones, is remarkably spotty.

It reeks so strongly of unintentional parody that it should make almost any Beatles fan wince with embarrassment. It's the perfect example of a bad script basing itself in reality (press clippings, collected lore) and yet still seeming so bizarrely wrong. Even the wigs deserve a laugh track.

I will waste little time on the wretched Lennon production: Lennon Naked, a Masterpiece Contemporary airing Sunday night on PBS. I write this only to warn viewers off of wasting even 10 minutes of TV time and their lives with this sorry docu-drama that follows Lennon through his Beatles fame and into his marriage to Yoko Ono and the end of the band.