1 hr 40 mins, in cinemas

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Fascinating doco uses iconic duo to examine a moment in American history.

There are few people in history more iconic – or more studied – than John Lennon. The bespectacled Beatle-turned-Bolshie is one of the world’s most-recognised stars, his beloved music just one part of his complicated legacy. Adding to the mythos is his partnership (in love, life, art and politics) with the Japanese artist Yoko Ono, an icon in her own right. Their stories have been the focus of countless books, biopics, docuseries and more, serving a clamouring (if sometimes scathing) public desperate for insight into their heroes. So it would be only natural to be skeptical about what another John and Yoko doco could add to the canon at this point. Kevin McDonald neatly sidesteps this debate entirely with his fascinating documentary One to One. Rather than attempting to offer some impossible new revelation about the private sides of Lennon and Ono, McDonald leans into the over-exposure of their lives, exploring the role they played as figureheads for a very specific movement – in a very specific moment – in American history. 

One to One, named after a benefit concert hosted by Lennon and Ono in New York in 1972, focuses on the first few years the couple spent in America. These were the years of the famous New York Village loft, where the pair’s existence in just two rooms was distinctly student-like (right down to all the famous shots of them working in bed). The doco uses exclusively (well, almost exclusively – more on that later) contemporaneous material, stitching together TV clips, amateur footage and Lennon’s own recorded tapes of his phone calls. It goes without saying that for a couple as famous as Lennon and Ono, there’s no shortage of interviews, performances and indeed, self-promotion for McDonald to choose from. Though critically, footage of John and Yoko themselves accounts for only about 60% of the material. Woven into the depiction of the couple’s lives is a constant stream of media from the time, and not just factual documentary stuff like TV news reports and footage of demonstrations – TV advertising, for example, features prominently. Sometimes the editing (from Sam Rice-Edwards and Bruna Manfredi) becomes frenetic, switching between clips like a channel-surfer hopping from station to station – complete with sounds and graphics to imitate the effect of flicking through channels. 

If this stylistic choice sounds a tad amateurish, it does come across that way in the early scenes. But over time, as the themes McDonald is playing with emerge, its purpose as a storytelling technique becomes clear. Not only is McDonald giving us the cultural context for those years of Lennon and Ono’s lives, but he’s making a point about how media shapes our shared cultural understanding of nationhood. News footage of the continued popularity of Richard Nixon is contrasted against depictions of the Watergate scandal and the horrors of Vietnam, which in turn are juxtaposed with eerily perfect representations of the American Dream in ads for Chrysler and Tupperware. Talk show clips and interviews with influential (and outsized) counterculture personalities Allen Ginsberg and Jerry Rubin (also personal friends of Lennon and Ono) show the charisma, humour and showmanship that garnered them dedicated followers. We see the way Lennon and Ono became the artists-laureate of the dying days of flower power; how their image became synonymous with revolution and fighting the man. The bare minimum of anything in the form of a narrative voice (there are a few notes on-screen about dates) creates an appealing cinema verite effect, but we are still only ever watching the characters when they are in a performative mode, knowing they are on-screen in front of an audience. It’s not so much fly-on-the-wall as it is fly-in-the-front-row-seat (a metaphor that you’ll appreciate if you end up seeing the movie). 

The only non-contemporaneous footage is languorous shots of a recreation of Lennon and Ono’s New York Village apartment. Every shot emphasises the constant presence of the TV at the end of the bed, dominating the small room. Lennon describes TV as having “replaced the fireplace” in his childhood and McDonald cleverly reminds us that Lennon and Ono not only formed part of the televisual representations of America at that time, but 

were consumers of that shared narrative as well. Indeed, some of the material McDonald has chosen to include paints a picture of Ono and Lennon as somewhat fickle in the way their politics were shaped by media representations. Most obviously, the One to One concert for which the documentary is named spawned from a TV news report Lennon and Ono saw that simply made them sad. The documentary also contains deserved acknowledgement of the privilege of these two rich kids whose political whims were indulged by the vast crew of enablers around them; a particularly funny exchange between Lennon and his manager features the latter toadying to the to the singer by reassuring him that his idea of paying for bail for thousands of prisoners is “really great”, despite John clearly having put no thought into it at all. 

In fact the documentary has a surprising amount of genuinely funny moments, judiciously peppered throughout. It’s also worth crediting McDonald for giving equal consideration to Ono and Lennon; whatever you think of Ono’s artistry (the film’s unedited depictions of her singing don’t do her any favours), I think there’s a growing cultural realisation that misogyny (and probably racism) was a significant factor in the hatred she faced for “breaking up the Beatles” (a highly questionable assumption in the first place). Here she’s presented as John’s equal, and the various clips of her speaking about her own self-image (including in the immediate post-Beatles era) give her an agency I haven’t seen in many other depictions. 

McDonald is clearly focusing on Lennon and Ono’s external lives, but he does include some allusions to their private selves – most notably, with Lennon’s reference to his turbulent childhood, immediately followed up by footage of him singing about his parents at the One to One concert. (It’s mad that I’ve gotten to this point in the review without mentioning the music. Songs from the One to One concert are played in full, and in addition to being highly enjoyable to watch in a cinema with surround-sound, they’re used creatively by McDonald to essentially become music videos that are vehicles for montages of contemporaneous footage.) To be honest, I thought the scenes dealing with Lennon and Ono’s personal lives were where the film was at its weakest, because they’re abrupt and non-revelatory; the references to Ono’s snatched-away daughter Kyono, for example, are only resolved with a brief on-screen note at the end of the documentary. It also brings into question all the other parts of the couples’ personal lives that are completely unaddressed (why devote so much time to Kyono and none at all to Lennon’s ex-wife and first son, who he’d effectively abandoned in England?)  But it’s easily forgiven because it’s so obviously not the story McDonald is trying to tell. 

I actually think this documentary is misnamed and it’s a shame. ‘One to One’ implies we’re going to get some kind of great love story, or at least an inquiry into Lennon and Ono’s relationship with each other. Lennon fans might specifically go to see the film in expectation of this kind of story, while Beatles-skeptics will probably avoid it for exactly the same reason. But this isn’t what McDonald is aiming for at all. He is deliberately looking at the couple from the outside and where they fit into America’s self-narrative in the early 1970s. If you want some Lennon/Ono fan service, this is not the film for you. But if you want a fascinating, insightful deliberation on a specific moment in American history, along with considered reflection on the nature of on-screen storytelling, this is a must-see.