Everyone knows about the myth of John Lennon‘s “lost weekend” — an allegedly boozy, party-animal, bachelor-on-the-loose period which lasted from the summer of ’73 until early ’75. Separated from Yoko Ono, living in Los Angeles with short-term girlfriend May Pang, romping around with Harry Nillson, Alice Cooper, Keith Moon and Micky Dolenz, collectively known as the Hollywood Vampires.

You’d presume that a documentary about this 18-month chapter, especially one actually called The Lost Weekend, would…I don’t know, catalogue the wild times and over-the-top-shenanigans and cocaine snorts and whatnot, and perhaps convey…oh, perhaps a meditation about the decline and fall of this ’60s wind-down, Hotel California, rich-rocker mentality, and how this sense of gradual drainage finally bottomed out and led to the birth of punk in ’75, or something along those lines.

There’s a Tribeca Film Festival screening tonight of Eve Brandstein, Richard Kaufman and Stuart Samuels‘ The Lost Weekend: A Love Story, and what a disappointment to learn from Roy Trakin’s 6.9 Variety article that it’s primarily a May Pang recollection-of-a-love affair thing and that it doesn’t really dig into the madman stuff.

Okay, maybe it does but Trakin’s piece discourages.

Most deflating passage: “Pang insists the celebrated Troubadour incidents — where John was thrown out of the iconic Hollywood club for heckling the Smothers Brothers and then for putting a sanitary napkin on his head — were anomalies in Lennon’s stay in Los Angeles, where he was relentlessly egged on by sidekick Harry Nilsson in particular.

“’John was drinking, but that was overblown in retrospect,’ says Pang. ‘The press keeps repeating the same stories over and over.'”

Second most deflating passage: “I decided it was time to reclaim my own history,” says Pang, 72. “It’s my version. I figured, if there was going to be a film about my life, I should be involved. Who better to tell the story than me? I lived it. These are my memories. No one experienced it like I did. Why should I let somebody else talk about my time with John?’”