'The Movement You Need': Brendan Hunt goes solo at Steppenwolf

“When I was calling for Paul McCartney, I was calling for my mom,” Brendan Hunt tells the audience. He’s speaking both of an acid trip in Amsterdam in 2003, and someone he’s sought to understand his entire life. The Movement You Need, the solo show from the Emmy-winning co-creator and star of Ted Lasso, delivers an autobiographical love letter to the Beatles and Hunt’s late mother. Performed with Hunt’s trademark dry wit and plenty of heart, it’s a giggle-inducing, tearjerking tribute to the ones who shape us.

The show’s title refers to a lyric in “Hey Jude,” penned by McCartney for young Julian Lennon in the wake of his parents’ divorce. Chicago native Hunt is also a child of divorce, raised by a single mother whose bartending job descended into alcoholism that would eventually lead to her death. Hunt’s mother instilled a love of the Fab Four early on, inviting her then-three-year-old son onto the couch with her to watch Yellow Submarine—highly inappropriate for a toddler, Hunt notes, but formative nonetheless.

Brendan Hunt in "The Movement You Need." — Brendan Hunt in “The Movement You Need.” Photo by Jenn Udoni.

The wisdom in a throwaway lyric

Hunt’s Beatlemania influenced everything from his first kiss in high school to the name of his own son, and saw him through college hookups gone awry (she liked The Monkees, dealbreaker!). It also helped weather professional failures, and a knowledge that took decades to take hold: to quote Hey Jude, “the movement you need is on your shoulder.” As Hunt notes, McCartney’s throwaway lyric in the song (now tattooed on his shoulder) is actually wisdom. “The movement you need,” Hunt observes, “can mean whatever you need it to.”

Through Hunt’s specificity—references to Chicago watering holes, a button depicting a very bloody Beatles alt album cover, and a comic video for his mother’s intervention—comes a universal truth. Families are complex. People leave before closure is an option. Love is messy, yet glorious. The Movement You Need is a stunner, a bittersweet musical fable that ends with what Hunt acknowledges is a cliché for a reason: what we often seek out most is, in fact, there all along.