\n\tI love when a project has a title that seems just a little off but offers a purposeful piece of wordplay.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tIt doesn\u2019t have to be distractingly askew.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\t\t\t\t\tEverywhere Man: The Lives and Times of Peter Asher\t\t<\/p>\n
\n\t\t\t\t\tThe Bottom Line<\/p>\n
\tOverlong and uneven, but filled with musical magic.<\/p>\n
\t\t\t\t\t\t\tVenue: Telluride Film Festival\u00a0
Directors: Dan Geller and Dayna Goldfine
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t1 hour 57 minutes\n\t\t<\/p>\n
\n\tTake, for example, Everywhere Man<\/a>: The Lives and Times of Peter Asher, the new documentary by Dan Geller and Dayna Goldfine (Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen, A Journey, A Song<\/a>). It\u2019s a title you could skim a dozen times without stopping and going, \u201cWait, isn\u2019t the idiom \u2018life and times\u2019?\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tIt takes very little time into Geller and Goldfine\u2019s slightly overstuffed and slightly imbalanced documentary to recognize what they\u2019re doing.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tPeter Asher is one of several figures who served as the Forrest Gump or Zelig or Chance the Gardener of the counterculture \u2014 people who pop up in the background of seemingly every photograph taken across several decades, whose names grace the liner notes of every significant album, whose accomplishments merit acknowledgment in countless award show speeches.<\/p>\n \n\tIf you\u2019re a devotee of Swinging London of the \u201960s or the Sunset Strip folk rock scene of the \u201970s, he\u2019s already an icon. But even if you\u2019re not, his integrality to countless pop culture narratives beggars belief, because he has, indeed, lived many lives both in the spotlight and immediately adjacent. The pleasure of Everywhere Man is that every time you think you\u2019ve seen the wildest piece of Peter Asher adjacency, the next chapter proves you wrong. Kinda.<\/p>\n \n\tThe problem of having multiple lives, though, is that not all lives are created equal. At 117 minutes, Everywhere Man is a sprawling film, one that goes from exciting and unpredictable to the stuff of countless rock-n-roll biopics, but the directors treat everything equally \u2014 or else lack the material to make the second half of the documentary anywhere near as engaging as the first.<\/p>\n \n\tThe bold-type version of Asher\u2019s career is that he went from one-half of the British Invasion duo Peter & Gordon \u2014 you\u2019ll recognize \u201cWorld Without Love\u201d \u2014 to the legendary producer who steered artists like James Taylor and Linda Ronstadt to the biggest hits of their careers. He has called himself one of the inspirations for Austin Powers, and his list of celebrity friends includes \u2026 everybody.<\/p>\n \n\tBut it\u2019s the little details and not the broad strokes that inspired Asher to write and perform the one-man show \u2014 or \u201cmusical memoir\u201d \u2014 that Geller and Goldfine use as the spine of the documentary.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tTo hint at only a few of the head-scratching biographical oddities of Asher\u2019s lives: His father was the physician responsible for identifying and naming Munchausen syndrome. He and his ginger siblings had acting careers promoted with the unlikely headshot promo \u201cAll Have Red Hair.\u201d He contributed, directly or indirectly, to the relationships between Mick Jagger and Marianne Faithfull and John Lennon and Yoko Ono. He helped introduce Taylor to Carole King and helped convince Carole King to perform as a solo artist.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tThe first half of the documentary is a delightful and thoroughly unlikely progression through one of the most colorful artistic moments in recent history, steered by Asher\u2019s own memories and appearances by friends including Twiggy, Eric Idle and many more. The music<\/a> is wonderful and the archival footage a blast.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tI compared Asher to Zelig and Forrest Gump and Chance the Gardener, but that\u2019s reductive. Some parts of his rise were absolutely based on happenstance and circumstance: His sister was dating Paul McCartney (interviewed here in audio only), who allowed Peter & Gordon to record \u201cWorld Without Love,\u201d a Lennon-McCartney composition that Lennon hated. But however self-deprecating Asher often is, it\u2019s clear that he was more than just in the right place at the right time. He was talented, and there were bigger-picture societal trends that he helped bring together.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tInterestingly, as the documentary goes from the parts of Asher\u2019s biography that might be interpreted as luck-driven to the chapters in which his genius is most obvious, it becomes less entertaining, albeit never unentertaining.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tTaylor is a guarded, but appreciative interview subject, and if you\u2019re interested in his growth from the first artist signed to the Beatles\u2019 fledgling Apple label into one of the most significant figures in the \u201970s folk movement, this is good stuff. Is it better than the 2022 documentary (Carole King & James Taylor: Just Call Out My Name)that gives Taylor and King full focus? Probably not.<\/p>\n