Chris Flackett
The 18-month period running between 1971 and 1973 where John Lennon and Yoko Ono moved from their opulent English country house with its lusciously green grounds, Tittenhurst Park near Ascot, to a tiny two-room apartment in Greenwich Village in New York, was an incredibly busy period for the couple. It would end with both severe political and personal trouble, culminating in an infamous ‘Lost Weekend‘, but for those 18 months, Lennon and Ono were inspired, politicized, creative, participatory and ultimately happy, as One to One: John & Yoko, a new documentary from Kevin MacDonald and Sam Rice-Edwards, demonstrates.
The first question you might have: is it really necessary for there to be another John Lennon documentary, especially considering his life has been so substantially documented, and that there is also another documentary out there documenting this period, LENNONYC. Happily for Lennon fans and non-fan but interested film audiences alike, One to One: John & Yoko is an inventive, energetic, and conceptually satisfying endeavour, one that forgoes the obvious ‘talking head’ and retrospect approach and trying its best to live in the moment it is documenting. It wraps the viewer up in a specific feel of time and place.
In the aftermath of the Beatles’ split, Lennon and Ono, feeling ostracized by the English media, who mocked their conceptual-art peace demonstrations and called Yoko ugly, and ridiculously over-aggressive Beatles fans who would pull Yoko’s hair in the street and issue racist slurs at her, the pair moved to Greenwich Village, then the hippest place in New York, to find sanctuary in a city more culturally and politically sympathetic than London.
Formally, One to One: John & Yoko takes Lennon’s repeated admission of being addicted to watching American television, particularly during this period, as the frame around which the film is built. MacDonald and Rice-Edwards do not use talking heads, but use a nifty mock-up of the Lennon-Ono apartment to bring viewers into their personal space, closing in on the television to run through a compilation of clips from period American television. It’s a mixture that features such TV stalwarts as The Waltons and The Mary Tyler Moore Show, numerous political speeches, rallies and demonstrations as taken from the news, and clips of Lennon and Yoko being interviewed and performing. A clip of the famous 1972 ‘One to One’ Madison Square Garden benefit for the children of Willowbrook State School for Retarded Children is shown, from which the film takes its name.
The concert footage itself is astonishingly good, with the image and sound being noticeably and substantially improved from the mid-80’s video release. Sean Ono-Lennon has done a fantastic job of remastering the sound, with the music sounder much warmer and deeper than previous releases of this material. The music might ultimately be the star of the show; Lennon was in crazy-good voice, and both John and Yoko have extraordinary stage presence, something you would expect, but might have forgotten when you consider this was the last full-length show that John Lennon ever played.
The use of such footage, transitioned between by the use of ‘channel-hopping,’ is powerful in establishing the mood of the times and letting those times speak for themselves, as opposed to re-contextualizing it, with only minimum context given by the occasional title card in typewriter font. This allows us to really successfully submerge into the atmosphere of early 70s New York and America. Then-President Nixon was campaigning and then winning a massive landslide electoral victory whilst activists such as Jerry Rubin make hot-headed, self-righteous speeches full of radical left-wing ideology and plan assertive political action such as demonstrating at the 1972 Republican National Convention. News interviews with the general public give an interesting collection of varying opinion, showing a country at clear, aggressive loggerheads between its more conservative and liberal sides. It’s a completely compelling montage of a tense time in American history (and, unfortunately, still feels as relevant today).
Against this backdrop, the picture painted of John and Yoko is fascinating. John had stated in later interviews how free he felt in New York as compared to England. The typical New Yorker indifference to celebrity allowing him to move around freely without being bothered by the public, whereas in England at the time, he was hounded by fans and press alike, unable to breathe or find space for himself. Using previously unaired tapes of phone calls John and Yoko made at the time, we get a hint of this freedom: John talking about the joy of doing something as simple as going out and buying a jacket, without anyone taking the slightest bit of notice of who he was. New York gave him a kind of tempered anonymity, something that perhaps, in London, John had never thought would be possible again.
This newfound freedom seemed to feed into John and Yoko’s enthusiasm for political activity, something that they had obviously been involved in prior to their move, but which seemed to accelerate further once in The Big Apple. The likes of Jerry Rubin, Abbie Hoffman and A.J. Weberman jumped on the opportunity to use a big name to their own ends to support and validate their causes, and initially John and Yoko seem happy to be in the mix, with Lennon in particular excitedly discussing the proposed ‘Rock Liberation Front’ tour of music and political speeches. Yoko is more considered, as she usually was politically, particularly when discussing her own feminism in relation to the experience she had in England as the supposed ‘Woman Who Broke Up The Beatles.’ Lennon was perhaps the more naive of the two, but his intentions were usually good, such as in the phone recording featured here of Lennon and manager Allen Klein. Lennon excitedly reveals his plans to give money to prisoners for bail in each city the tour stops in, Klein clearly unimpressed but just about successfully feigning approval (to be fair, he was probably working out how much money he could pocket from such activity).
If there is a flaw here, it’s that a little more context could be given, whether that be film or audio phone call clips. The death of the Rock Liberation Front tour idea isn’t really explained, although it is implied that Lennon’s infamous immigration case had something to do with John and Yoko politically calming down. What’s missing for those viewers who might not know the whole story is that John and Yoko (quite rightfully) suspected they were being used in the end, and disagreed with Rubin’s plans for violence. David Sheff’s brilliant book, All We Are Saying, his transcript of the 1980 Playboy interview with John and Yoko, has a fascinating moment when John and Yoko discuss this period dismissively, whilst confirming that they were political but that they had always been non-violent, an ideology they ultimately couldn’t reconcile with the radical left of the time.
Something towards explaining this might have made a nice capper to the film, but in fairness, the One to One: John & Yoko has no interest in providing a neat narrative. It’s interested in playing with the form, with communicating the passion, excitement, and righteousness of using your art to stand up for what you believe in.
Much like John Lennon himself.
One to One: John & Yoko is in theaters from April 11, 2025.
