Iron-on revolutionary

With the passage of time, every cultural icon seems to rate little more than T-shirt status. The actual ideas and legacy seem to fade away, and only the mere shell of the person is evoked in Che, Lenin and Einstein shirts for sale at the local subculture emporium.

John Lennon is one of those figures, one whose perception as an icon often threatens to obscure his significance as a flesh-and-blood man.

The documentary The U.S. vs. John Lennon, directed by David Leaf and John Scheinfeld, examines Lennon's harassment under the Nixon administration for his political beliefs. In doing so, the filmmakers restore Lennon's humanity, preventing history from reducing the former Beatle into a brand. What emerges is a portrait of a quirky, misunderstood but earnest man.

Lennon's experience illustrated how easily an artist and his ideas can get lost when shoved through the media shredder. Through his provocative, irreverent collaborations with wife and conceptual artist Yoko Ono, Lennon beat the media at their own game. Whether insisting that reporters interview him and Ono inside a bag or staging "bed-in" peacenik interviews from their hotel bed, Lennon took the media's obsession with his life and helped turn it into his own conceptual, engaging soapbox for political protest -- most often against the war in Vietnam.

The U.S. vs. John Lennon opens with a 1971 concert staged in Ann Arbor, Mich., at which Lennon performed to show solidarity for activist John Sinclair, who was sentenced to 10 years for selling two joints to an undercover cop. (He later immortalized Sinclair in song.) The benefit concert was an indication of Lennon's political power with the kids, a persuasive ability that people like Nixon and FBI director J. Edgar Hoover didn't exactly "dig." The administration feared Lennon's next stop would be the 1972 Republican convention, where he might convince his young acolytes to help prevent Nixon's re-election.

The U.S. vs. John Lennon moves backward from that incident to illustrate how Lennon's political education grew and became a perceived threat to the administration, which tapped Lennon's phone, hired agents to shadow him and even launched a bureaucratic mission to have him deported when his political activism proved too threatening.

There is not a single Beatle interviewed in the film, though a crazy quilt of subjects -- many of them also involved in anti-war activities -- offers perspectives on both Lennon and the times from which he sprang. Like a cocktail party staged by a madman, this group includes G. Gordon Liddy (playing up the part of the jerky-hide neo-con), activist Angela Davis, Born on the Fourth of July author Ron Kovic, Yoko Ono (lending a healthy dose of intimacy to the project), Geraldo Rivera and author Gore Vidal. Vidal is probably the most outspoken amid all the lefties interviewed for the film, tracing the connections between the Bush and Nixon administrations in terms of promoting overzealous surveillance and intractable wars.

Co-directors Leaf and Scheinfeld are old hands at this music personality documentary racket, having directed films on Ricky Nelson, Frank Sinatra and the Bee Gees among many others. For the most part, their work is filmed with a conventional small-screen, documentary meat-and-potatoes sense that getting the job done is foremost on the filmmakers' minds.

The documentary also feels especially relevant today as history threatens to repeat itself, perhaps helping awaken a younger generation of fans to political matters via the beguiling rock icon of Lennon.

The use of music lends emotional gravity to the proceedings, with Lennon-penned songs like "Imagine" and "Revolution" becoming not just anthems of the protest movement but an expression of Lennon's idealism and hopefulness, an occurrence even rarer than political outspokenness in our jaded age.

"When I hear the song 'Revolution,' even now, it still chokes me up," says Ono, who expresses the ability of Lennon's music to cut through political cant and denial with an honesty that still startles.