Peter Asher's story is fundamentally a story about proximity — the art of being exactly the right person in exactly the right room at exactly the right moment. Brother of Paul McCartney's girlfriend, half of a McCartney-subsidised pop act, A&R chief at Apple Records, producer of James Taylor and Linda Ronstadt: every chapter depends on the one before it, and the whole chain depends on his sister's romantic life. The documentary, smartly structured around Asher's live anecdotes-and-music show, has the good grace to acknowledge this, even if it stops short of the full reckoning. The Beatles material is the obvious gravitational centre, and the film handles it well. The detail about Lennon sneering at the lyric of 'A World Without Love' — 'Please lock me away' / 'Yes' — is a small gem: it explains both why the song went to Peter and Gordon instead of staying with the Beatles and exactly what kind of acid Lennon brought to everything around him. Asher's co-ownership of the Indica Gallery, where Lennon first met Yoko Ono, gets its moment too, though the film quietly buries the fact that the gallery lasted only two years. When you're curating a legacy, you choose your emphases. The more interesting half of the film lives in Los Angeles. Asher's instinct to follow James Taylor westward after the Apple Records debut — which he self-deprecatingly admits he overproduced with Beatles-style orchestration — turned out to be one of the better career pivots in 1970s music. Sweet Baby James, the Ronstadt years, Andrew Gold, JD Souther: this is where Asher stopped being a beneficiary of other people's connections and started building something recognisably his own. The fact that this now reads as comfortably middle-of-the-road soft rock is a historical verdict, not a dismissal — punk came along and rearranged everyone's sense of what counted. Carole King lands strongly in the talking-head segments, and the archival footage is well-chosen throughout. But the most resonant material involves Asher's late partner Gordon Waller — the virtual duet Asher constructs for his live show is genuinely moving, the kind of detail that lifts a music documentary above a promotional exercise. Waller died in 2009 and the film handles the absence with real tenderness. What you won't get here is conflict, dirt, or any serious interrogation of the extractive machinery of the music industry in the era Asher helped build. This is a film that Peter Asher appears to have had considerable input into — it is affectionate, admiring, and broadly celebratory. That's not a disqualifying flaw; plenty of great music documentaries are made with subjects who are alive and cooperative. But it does mean the film operates more as authorised memoir than as biography. The nerdish, clean-living image Asher projects is allowed to stand unchallenged, with only a winking acknowledgment in the closing credits that it might not be the whole picture.
