Jealous Guy: The Assassination of John Lennon review – what drives a fan to murder?

Forty years on from his death, this documentary tells the story of the Beatles star, the man who killed him for ‘self glory’, and the biographer who has followed their interlinking tales ever since

It feels as if there are a couple of competing documentaries within the feature-length Jealous Guy: The Assassination of John Lennon (Sky Documentaries). One is a straightforward, relatively familiar account of Lennon’s life story, picking up from the Beatles’ first visit to the US and following that through to his death at the age of 40, 40 years ago. The other is less developed, but far more intriguing, and centres on the journalist Jack Jones, who wrote a biography of Lennon’s killer, Mark Chapman. Why is Jones so fascinated by Chapman’s life story, and what is he looking for in his decades-long relationship with it?

I suspect that would have been a harder sell, though it certainly would have been an original take. Instead, this is a faithful, sometimes insightful, occasionally salacious recounting of how one of the most famous musicians the world had ever known came to be shot dead by Chapman in New York City in December 1980. Chapman’s life story is troubled and bleak, and the director, Bill Badgley, treads a fine and, I think, fair line when it comes to exploring the many factors that may go towards explaining how Chapman came to pull the trigger that day.