On December 8th, 1980, John Lennon was shot and killed in New York City by a man named Mark David Chapman.

While much has been written about John Lennon and his life and his beliefs, Mark David Chapman, serving a life sentence and rarely giving interviews, has always remained more of an enigma.  What exactly motivated him to shoot John Lennon remains a mystery.  At the time of the shooting, Chapman was carrying a copy of Catcher In The Rye and some accounts insist that Chapman believed himself to be Holden Caulfield or that he shot Lennon to try to bring more attention to the book.  Depending on which source you go to, Chapman was either a Beatles superfan or he was someone who rarely listened to rock ‘n’ roll.  Chapman either worshipped Lennon or he was offended by Lennon’s flippant remark about the Beatles being bigger than Jesus.  Some people claim that Chapman was looking for fame by killing someone famous.  Others claim that Lennon was not even Chapman’s main target and Chapman, in one of the few interviews that he did give, listed a long list of targets — including several other celebrities and politicians — that he considered going after at one point or another.

If anything, Mark David Chapman would appear to be a lot like Arthur Bremer, the directionless drifter who seriously wounded Governor George Wallace in 1972 and whose diary inspired Paul Schrader to create the character of Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver.  Like Chapman, Arthur Bremer traveled the country without apparent direction.  Like Chapman, Bremer considered many different targets before settling on Wallace.  And like Chapman, Bremer gave a lot of conflicting reasons for his actions.  One gets the feeling that neither Chapman nor Bremer (nor a lot of other assassins) really understood why they were driven to kill (or, in Bremer’s case, attempt to kill) so they grasped at whatever solution seemed to convenient at the time.  Apparently, anything was preferable to just admitting to being a severely damaged human being.

2007’s Chapter 27, follows Mark David Chapman (played by Jared Leto) as he travels to Manhattan and spends several days camped outside of the famous Dakota Apartment Building, hoping to see John Lennon (played by Mark Lindsay Chapman, who reportedly missed out on an earlier opportunity to play Lennon because he shared the same name as Lennon’s assassin).  The film is narrated by Mark David Chapman, who tries to talk tough just like Holden Caulfield but who can’t hide the fact that he’s basically just a fat loser who has no idea how to communicate with any of the other people that he meets in New York.  He creeps out a friendly groupie (played by Lindsay Lohan).  He gets into an argument with a photographer (Judah Friedlander).  He annoys countless Dakota doormen.  About the only person who isn’t annoyed by Chapman is Lennon himself, who politely signs an autograph just a few hours before Chapman shoots him in the back.

It’s a well-made and well-directed film and Jared Leto gives a memorably creepy performance as Mark David Chapman.  (That said, the accent that he uses while speaking as Chapman once again proves the danger of giving a method actor any role that involves a Southern accent.)  Leto gained a good deal of weight to Chapman and he’s thoroughly believable as a very familiar type of obsessive fan.  That said, the film still can’t make Chapman into a particularly compelling character because there’s really nothing compelling about someone like Mark David Chapman.  The man he killed was compelling, regardless of what you may think about the politics of a song like Imagine.  But Chapman himself was just a fat loser.  Leto does a good job of portraying Chapman as being a fat loser but it’s still hard to watch the film without wondering what the point of it all is.  We don’t need a movie to tell us that Mark David Chapman was a loser.

At its best, the film creates a sense of claustrophobia.  Almost the entire film is told from Chapman’s point of view and the best moments are the ones where Chapman finds himself overwhelmed by 1980s New York.  It’s a film that does inspire one to consider how strange it is that someone like Mark David Chapman could change the course of the culture through one deadly action.  (The film did cause me to think about how different things would have been if Chapman had boarded a Greyhound and left New York without returning to the Dakota that night.)  But, in the end, the film cannot answer the question of why Chapman did what he did.  Perhaps that’s because there really is no answer, beyond the randomness of fate and the dangers of fame.