This portrait of psychosis slouches into release a couple months before the other Mark David Chapman movie, Chapter 27, which stars Jared Leto as the shooter and Lindsay Lohan perhaps just for the hell of it. What Killing lacks in celebrity sparkle, it compensates for in raw ambition and rude chills. To watch Ball’s Chapman, acting as if he’d only heard rumors of normal human behavior, lurch from his home in Hawaii to Lennon’s doorstep at the Dakota is to follow a bizarre pilgrim’s progress through pop myth and clammy madness. While a production this unpolished, with its arty excesses and embarrassing anachronisms, doesn’t really want to court comparisons with Scorsese, it gets a lot of juice from referencing Taxi Driver — another meditative horror film about a lone gunman and his solitary soul.
