‘One To One: John & Yoko’ review: dissecting Lennon and Ono’s post-Beatles life

Premiering at the 2024 Venice Film Festival in an out-of-competition slot, Kevin Macdonald’s remarkable documentary, co-directed with editor Sam Rice-Edwards, charts a year in the lives of John Lennon and Yoko Ono, beginning in 1972, shortly after their move to New York. Combining a wealth of archive material with some thrilling concert footage, the film captures the couple at a fascinating time in their lives, when Lennon was forging a post-Beatles life for himself as a social activist.

Macdonald and Rice-Edwards hit upon an inspired structure for the film. A caption reminds the audience that during their well publicised hotel “love-in”, when John and Yoko remained in bed as a protest, they watched an awful lot of television. To that end, the film employs a channel-flipping aesthetic to switch between the various archive and concert videos, a smart decision that gives the film a strong sense of pace.

That central conceit feels original and works brilliantly, with the clips alternating between snippets of John and Yoko (ranging from TV appearances and interviews to home movies) and contextual images from 1972, including everything from TV show and news reels to commercials, which provides a fascinating snapshot of the time period, when Nixon was campaigning for re-election and the aftermath of the Attica prison riot was still being felt.

As the film progresses through 1972, a picture emerges of the company Lennon and Ono were keeping at the time, including Beat poet Allen Ginsberg, vocal activist Jerry Rubin (one of the Chicago Seven) and self-styled “Dylanologist” and Rock Liberation Front co-founder A.J. Weberman, who films himself going through Bob Dylan‘s trash, trying to prove that he’s become a hypocrite and a capitalist. In one of the film’s most amusing moments, a phone call reveals John trying to get Weberman to apologise for insulting Dylan, so that he’ll join him on an upcoming benefit concert tour.

John’s search for a new sense of identity and post-Beatles purpose is consistently compelling, as he casts around for various left-leaning causes to espouse. However, he remains pragmatic – abandoning a planned benefit concert for prisoners once it starts to look untenable and instead switching to a more widely palatable cause, the One To One benefit concert for disabled children from the Willowbrook state school, after a horrific news report from Geraldo Rivera exposes the disgusting conditions at the school.

The concert footage, filmed in Madison Square Garden, is utterly electrifying, and deserves to be seen in a cinema with the best sound system you can find. Though the material isn’t new, the quality has been completely remastered and the sound given a loving remix by John and Yoko’s son, Sean Lennon.

On that note, it’s fair to say that the film earns its title, giving Yoko Ono much more focus than she usually receives in Beatles-based documentaries. She emerges as a sharp, perceptive figure, who shares John’s sense of humour and is a passionate artist in her own right, as evidenced by a brilliant running gag whereby her assistant makes multiple phone calls attempting to get hold of a few thousand living flies for an upcoming art installation.

In short, this is a terrific documentary from start to finish, beautifully structured and by turns bracingly political, informative and inspiring. It’s also profoundly bittersweet, because it’s impossible to watch the film and wonder what kind of figure Lennon would have become in the 21st century. Just imagine.