Thunderous and Moving, One to One: John & Yoko Cuts Through the Beatles-Industrial Complex

One to One, the collective name given to the two Madison Square Garden shows performed by John Lennon and Yoko Ono over the course of one day in August 1972, constituted the only full concert Lennon gave in his post-Beatles career as a solo artist. He and Ono had been living in New York for a year, increasingly involving themselves in antiwar protests and a variety of other activist causes (so much so that the Nixon administration would spend several years trying to deport Lennon). The concert served as a kind of gift to their newly adoptive city, arriving soon after the much-maligned double album Some Time in New York City, which had come out that June. A live album of the concert itself would be released posthumously in 1986, along with a full-length video of the performance.

Footage from these shows forms the spine of Kevin MacDonald’s new documentary, One to One: John & Yoko, which might look at first like a standard-issue concert movie but turns out to be something quite different. Intercutting swift glimpses of news reports, commercials, television shows, contemporaneous interviews, and recently unearthed telephone conversations, MacDonald, along with co-director and editor Sam Rice-Edwards, gives us a whirlwind journey through what these two artists might have seen and experienced as they attempted to navigate the cultural and political upheaval of their times. There has been a bevy of Beatles-related films over the years (and we’re about to get a bunch more), but One to One cuts through the Beatles-industrial complex to land us in the middle of Lennon’s rage, confusion, passion, and fear. By taking the focus partly away from him, it finds him all over again.

That’s not to say that One to One isn’t also a very good concert doc. It’s being given an Imax release ahead of its wider theatrical rollout, and the picture and its remastered music are worth experiencing on the big screen. But through their juxtapositions, the filmmakers also reinvigorate the songs, many of which had started to feel like clichés over the years. We hear Lennon mention early on that he loves watching television: TV, he says, serves for him the same purpose as the fireplace did when he was a child — a thing to stare at for hours to pass the time. (After all, he had just moved from the U.K., which only had three channels. American TV, especially in New York, probably made for an endless carnival of distractions, even back then.) MacDonald and Rice-Edwards run with this idea, presenting their film almost as if the audience itself were switching channels, rapidly absorbing the textures of life in 1972. The rush of images might look disjointed at first, but the filmmakers catch vital resonances. When Lennon gives a speech about bringing back not just the soldiers from Vietnam but also the equipment (“Bring the machines home, and then we’ll really get somewhere”), they cut to a colorful snippet from The Price Is Right advertising a new washer and dryer. A phone conversation about paranoia and wiretapping and sinister figures following Lennon and Ono around is followed by news reports of the initial Watergate break-in.

By massaging these connections, MacDonald and Rice-Edwards give us a world whose confusion has pointed undercurrents, where people and things are more entangled with each other than they might seem. The machines, be they bombers or washers, are starting to own us, instead of the other way around. The paranoia that would eventually bring down Nixon has already seeped into every corner of society. We also get glimpses of notorious “Dylanologist” A.J. Weberman, a Bob Dylan superfan who felt so betrayed by Dylan’s popular success and turn against protest that he started stalking the singer, rummaging in his trash to find which products he used (all proof, in Weberman’s mind, that Dylan was supposedly betraying his revolutionary ideals). Even this bizarre relationship echoes the era’s confusion and paranoia, with its unchecked consumerism and its sense that corporate society now had a mind of its own, as well as the uneasy role celebrity plays in the whole thing. 

A nuanced picture of Lennon and Ono’s relationship emerges through the storm of footage. Yoko talks on the phone about the chauvinistic treatment she received during the Beatles’ later years and breakup. She comes off as the savvier of the two, a veteran artist precise in her dealings with assistants, colleagues, and journalists. Footage of a boyish John performing in some of Yoko’s installations feels at times like a wide-eyed kid at school discovering a new world of activism and experimentation with his cool, artsy, experienced new girlfriend. She’s leading him along, sure, but he’s eager to be led along. He’s one of the most famous people on the planet — a “monument,” as Yoko herself calls him — but he also seems so frantic, so lost, so anxious to do and to mean so much more. 

There’s sorrow too beneath Yoko’s hardened focus. She’s lost touch with her daughter Kyoko, who’s been unexpectedly whisked away by her father; part of the reason Lennon and Ono had moved to the U.S. was to be closer to the girl. Ono’s wailing, thundering rendition of “Don’t Worry Kyoko” at the One to One concert is among the film’s highlights, as is her later performance of “Looking Over From My Hotel Window” at a feminist conference, played out over pixelated black-and-white video footage of her and John, a misty reverie that hints at the loss to come. 

Yoko’s sorrow at being deprived of her child also feeds into the gut-punch of the movie’s final section, when we get additional context about the One to One concert itself. Those familiar with the event already know this, but the concert came about after Lennon and Ono saw Willowbrook: The Last Great Disgrace, a TV exposé by a young Geraldo Rivera (back when he was a real journalist) about the monstrous conditions at Staten Island’s understaffed Willowbrook Hospital, where mentally disabled children were forced to live in utter filth and agony. One to One was a benefit for these kids. The film’s belated revelation of this reframes the entire concert. It shows how Lennon’s frenzied, at times rudderless, activism during this era — a prison event here, an antiwar protest there — focused and crystallized into this tangible action with enormous real-life consequences. By helping heal one small corner of his world, he perhaps accomplished more than he ever had before. As a result, One to One: John & Yoko becomes not just an enormously moving historical portrait but a freshly relevant and cathartic one.