One to One: John & Yoko Dives Into John Lennon’s Post-Beatles Life With Yoko Ono

A new documentary about John Lennon and Yoko Ono dives into the couple's story, following a performance they gave together in the early 1970s.

Out April 11, One to One: John & Yoko focuses on the only full-length concert that John Lennon gave with Yoko Ono after he left the Beatles. During their Aug. 30, 1972, performance—which raised about $1.5 million for children with mental disabilities—audience members held up tambourines and joined the artists on the stage for their hit anti-war anthem “Give Peace a Chance.”

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At the time of the concert, the U.S. was embroiled in the Vietnam War amid a growing anti-war movement among Americans, and the film uses the concert as a jumping off point to explore how Lennon was using his platform to make a positive impact and call for peace. Director Kevin MacDonald made the film with restored footage of the landmark performances, and Lennon and Ono’s son Sean Lennon gave him permission to use hours of phone conversations that the rockstar had recorded in the 1970s. 

The couple championed not only radical political activism but also radical love. TIME talked to Sean Lennon about his parents’ love story, what he remembers about his father, who was killed 45 years ago, when he was only five years old, and the documentary’s important lesson for 2025.

The ballad of John and Yoko

At the time of the One-to-One concert, John Lennon had been married to the artist Yoko Ono for three years. They were living in Greenwich Village—sleeping in a bed made of a church pew—and they had recently released an album, Some Time In New York City.

Ono was an important part of Lennon’s political awakening. The two had captured widespread attention in 1969 for their “bed-in,” in which they stayed in bed for a week in a dramatic anti-war protest. 

 “I started waking up,” Lennon says of Ono’s effect on him in an interview featured in the film. 

One to One is full of quotable words of wisdom from the British rocker, like, “It’s easier to shout revolution and 'power to the people' than look at yourself,” as he told one interviewer.

Audio footage included in the film reveals that Lennon dreamt of  a “Free the People” tour in 1972, in which he’d pay for the release of prisoners in every city where he performed, ending in Miami during the Republican National Convention. 

Though the tour never happened, his ideas were so radical that President Nixon tried to deport him, and he became the subject of FBI surveillance. Lennon started wiretapping his own phone “in case the FBI accused him of something,” Sean Lennon tells TIME.

On the misogynistic idea that Yoko broke up the Beatles

As One to One shows, among the rallies that John attended was a rally for feminists with Ono. She has often been blamed for breaking up the Beatles, and in the doc, he sits beside her while she opens up about “how hard it is for women,” the hate she gets about being married to the rock star, and the people who repeatedly tell her to stop making radical art.

“The myth that my mother was some kind of villain who broke up the Beatles is past its time—very few people will watch this movie and hold on to that,” Lennon says. “I think people realize she was a lot more than that. She was not a villain. She was simply an artist who fell in love with a musician.”

Lennon says there is a lot of misogyny in the idea that his mother, now 92, singlehandedly broke up the Beatles.

“If she had been a quiet, arm-candy type of woman, maybe society would have accepted her more easily,” he says. “But she was not like that. She's a very strong, intellectual, powerful, independent artist.”

John Lennon’s legacy

Lennon’s life was cut short at an early age. At 40, he was assassinated on Dec. 8, 1980, outside of the exclusive Dakota apartment building on Manhattan’s Upper West Side.

Sean Lennon was only five years old when his father died, but he remembers his dad showing him how to swim, make paper planes, and giving him piano and guitar lessons.

“I became a musician because I missed him,” he says. “When I was a kid, I associated music with my dad, so playing music made me feel like I was connected to him. I became preoccupied with playing piano and learning guitar because there was this empty space where my dad was supposed to be.”

He hopes the documentary will resonate with a generation of moviegoers who grew up with social media. His parents “were sort of the first reality television and social media celebrities,” he says. “They filmed themselves all the time, invented little catch phrases like ‘give peace a chance’ and ‘bed peace’ to spread arguably subversive political messaging. John and Yoko were some of the first celebrities to use memes, before they were called memes.”

Their message is still relevant five decades later.

“I don't think my parents ever imagined that we'd still be entrenched in multiple foreign wars, it's really sad,” Lennon says. “I definitely ascribe to this idea that we'll never reach the stars or populate another solar system if we can't get past killing each other.”