ONE TO ONE: JOHN & YOKO - Mark Reviews Movies

One to One: John & Yoko, Magnolia Pictures

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Review by Mark Dujsik | April 10, 2025

In 1972, John Lennon would play his final full concerts at Madison Square Garden. He was in the middle of a lot of things at the time, a lot of them political, involving the war in Vietnam and the shifting tide of the protest movement on the left, and a good amount of it personal, too. This was after the end of the Beatles and Lennon's marriage to artist Yoko Ono, who would be pilloried and outright insulted for being the perceived reason for the break-up of the most popular band in the world. One to One: John & Yoko puts us right in the middle of all of this turmoil for the couple and the country by way of archival footage, home recordings, and, in the only real moments of solace, film of those live performances.

Director Kevin Macdonald's documentary, with co-director and editor Sam Rice-Edwards, doesn't so much present a straightforward narrative as it does a snapshot of an era by way of multiple mediums. The hook, perhaps, is that we're witnessing the world the way Lennon and Ono, who is almost as important a perspective as the man who usually has overshadowed her in the eyes of so many, would have seen it at the time.

This is the period when the two, trying to escape some of the pressures of fame and the trappings of wealth, lived in a two-room apartment in New York City's Greenwich Village, surrounded by other artists and activists. As Lennon himself puts it in one of the film's many interview clips (both on television and in audio recordings), the two spent most of their days talking, creating, and watching television—lots of television. Lennon didn't mind that last part in the slightest, because it was a way to see the entirety of society and culture reduced to short blocks of broadcast scheduling and within the frame of an electronic box.

The resulting film is like sitting down in front of a TV during the first couple years of the 1970s, when news reports were about the toll of the Vietnam War and the way the administration of Richard Nixon was escalating the conflict, talk shows were hesitant to talk about politics in any meaningful way, and commercials, as they always did and continue to do, sell us on wanting or needing some ordinary or old thing newly designed thing to make us happy. Lennon and Ono often appear in some of these clips, of course, because they were famous and the ending of the Beatles was still fresh on a lot of people's minds.

The two didn't want to talk about that, because Ono had her art and Lennon had his frustrations with the way his wife was being portrayed in the press. Together, the duo wanted people to start thinking about the war, Nixon, and activism in a way that would be different from the dying or dead "Flower Power" movement but retain its spirit. Other musicians at the time, especially folk-music hero Bob Dylan, were seen as having sold out by their more politically minded fans, so Lennon really was a bit of anomaly: a famous musician who put his principles into words and his words into some kind of action.

The barebones narrative of Macdonald's documentary is chronological for the most part, although the kaleidoscope of media on display here is more about capturing the climate of the time than anything else. Lennon and Ono are the driving force, speaking their minds on TV and proving that they mean what they say in private phone conversations to organize this event or that potential concert.

The reason the phone recordings exist, by the way, isn't a matter of forward-thinking preservation of history. It's one of legally defensive necessity, because the two started hearing odd clicks on the line, and believing that the phone had been bugged, Lennon decided to keep his own audio recordings. If the government was going to bring him to court for some reason, he'd at least have some record of what he said, instead of counting on and trusting the people surveilling him to do that.

If there is a hard and fast story to be found in this collection of audio-visual clips, it's in seeing how Lennon and Ono really were people of sincere belief in their politics and that political activism, revolving around peace and creativity, could make some kind of change. In their early enthusiasm, they make friends and allies with people who seem to have similar thoughts and ideas. Lennon and Ono arranged to get activist Jerry Rubin on a straitlaced TV talk show, for example, and with him, they started planning a concert tour that would blend music and protest. As soon as Rubin and some others began talking about more disruptive and possibly violent forms of protest, however, it was easy enough for the duo to cut ties—not because of the legal implications, but because that was never what they were about as artists, activists, or people.

It's a surprisingly intimate film, considering the wider scope of the story, and One to One: John & Yoko allows us to appreciate the two subjects as people acutely aware of their fame, holding a steadfast belief that they have responsibilities as artists and celebrities, and in the middle of much personal and professional change. Plus, it has those concert scenes, which would be a key selling point of a less-thoughtful documentary but exist as a nice bonus in this one.

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