John & Yoko’ Doc Focuses on the Couple’s Life in NYC

A presidential candidate who plays to white grievance is almost assassinated. A Black woman runs for president. A major deportation threat hangs in the air. People take to the streets to protest bombings and genocide. Sounds very much like modern times. Instead, it’s the post-Woodstock world of the early Seventies seen in Kevin Macdonald’s One to One: John & Yoko, a documentary that dares to take you into one of the most polarizing periods of one of pop culture’s most controversial couples. It’s the movie you didn’t think you’d want that turns out to be one of the few recent Beatles products you’ll need.

In the last few years, we’ve been awash in such Beatles content, some of it momentous, some marginal. One to One isn’t as revelatory as Get Back, Peter Jackson’s opus about the making of the Let It Be album, but it serves as something of a sequel. Taking in the years 1971 to 1973, it’s a whooshing subway ride of a movie about the period when Lennon and Ono left England for downtown New York, leaving behind a lush estate for an apartment in the West Village. The legal dissolution of the Beatles had just begun, and Lennon is heard saying in one of many phone recordings in the film, “I want to be me now.” And the New York of the dawn of the Seventies was where he wanted to blossom.

Starting with a recreation of Lennon and Ono’s cozy, somewhat messy apartment, which feels more like a home to sloppy college roommates than one of the most famous musicians in the world, One to One is a window into the chaotic intersection of rock stardom, radical-chic politics, and counterculture art. The couple had dabbled in that confluence while they were still in England, shaving off their hair in 1970 and donating the locks to an auction to benefit a house for disabled kids. But they plunged headfirst into it during their time in Greenwich Village. The artistic fruits of that period — the spotty and proudly abrasive Sometime in New York City album — were not very tasty, to extend the metaphor. But the circus that unfolded around them is more entertaining than some of the music they made during that era.

By way of interview recordings and taped phone calls (made by Lennon out of concern that he was being hassled by FBI, the immigration department, or both), One to One gives us a unique look into Lennon and Ono’s post-Beatles world. They may now be living in a workaday apartment with a TV set placed just beyond the foot of their bed so they don’t have to get up to watch it, but they’re still celebrity rock stars with whims and grievances all their own and more than a sense of entitlement. In one call, Ono complains to a friend that Paul, George, and Ringo continue to avoid giving her any props whatsoever (“That’s male chauvinism!”). Other calls are hilarious, like when pugnacious manager Allen Klein tries to talk Lennon out of singing a new song, “Attica” (about the famous prison riot) at a benefit for activist John Sinclair, instead of one of his hits.

In what amounts to a recurring gag, Ono is heard calling associates and demanding they round up thousands of live flies for a gallery exhibit. Those workers, including Lennon’s future girlfriend May Pang, are heard scrambling to find the insects in time for the opening. (Spoiler alert: They do, and we see the results.) An entire film of those taped conversations would be an amazing performance art exhibit on its own.

Yes, there’s also music. One to One gets its title from a rare concert that Lennon, Ono, and their backup band Elephant’s Memory played in New York in 1972. The show was a benefit for Willowbrook, a home for disabled children and adults that allowed its patients to wallow in filth and degradation. (That disgrace was exposed by a young Geraldo Rivera, then a swaggering TV news crusader before he went all Fox News on us; the transformation is still startling to absorb.) Most of the live footage has appeared before, on the posthumous Live in New York City album and home video in the Eighties. But rewatching Lennon’s last full concert, and on a big screen, is another experience altogether. Backing Lennon, Elephant’s Memory sound tougher and more cohesive than their legend has it. In close-ups of Lennon at the piano, singing “Mother,” each line of the song about his deceased parent seems to hit him harder than the last. That song, and a snarling version of “Come Together,” make you realize what a tragedy it was that Lennon, unlike his fellow Fabs, never did a full-on solo tour in his lifetime.

But One to One is as much about its moment in history as it is about John and Yoko. Imitating the barrage of TV news that Lennon and Ono would watch incessantly, Macdonald alternates the timeline of the couple’s life with news footage (the shooting of Alabama governor and segregationist George Wallace during a presidential campaign stop, Democratic congresswoman Shirley Chisholm making history as the first Black woman to seek her party’s presidential nomination) and frothy, often sexist commercials for cleaning products and cars. The dream of Sixties idealism is over: As Ono tells a friend in a call, “Flower power didn’t work, but so what — we’re starting again.”

But it’s a flawed reboot, for sure. We listen as Lennon is asked to participate in all manner of benefit concerts, and he and Ono start cavorting with a rebel-yell crowd that includes coarse troubadour David Peel and Yippie co-founder Jerry Rubin, whose love of the spotlight rivals that of any arena rocker. In 1972, Lennon and Rubin hatch an idea for a tour in which ticket sales would go toward bail for wrongly imprisoned political prisoners in this country. The idea is both charitable and a little harebrained, and we listen as they almost get Bob Dylan on board (by way of intermediaries, not Dylan himself). Ono calls notorious Dylanologist A.J. Weberman — seen digging through garbage cans in front of Dylan’s Village apartment and finding a very uncool empty container of Clorox — to tell him to back off and stop freaking Dylan out. He agrees, but ultimately Dylan bails and the whole tour falls apart.

Not too long after that fiasco, Lennon and Ono head uptown to the Dakota building on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. The move from sooty downtown to more stylishly sooty uptown now feels doubly symbolic. Even they, it seems, had had enough of playing revolutionary with diminishing returns. And given Richard Nixon’s 1972 landslide, who can blame them?

The movie has a happy ending of sorts: Lennon overcomes an attempt by the Nixon team to deport him, and baby Sean soon comes into the couple’s life. But a chilling hint of the future arrives when Lennon is talking with drummer Jim Keltner about safety concerns connected to that aborted bail-money tour: “You mean people trying to kill us or something like that?” Lennon says. “I’m not about to get myself shot.” We all know what came not long after, first for Lennon and now the country. But even in his wildest or most paranoid moments, Lennon probably never fully imagined that the America of 1972 would foreshadow the country more than 50 years later.