On August 30, 1972, in New York City, John Lennon played his only full-length show after leaving The Beatles, the One to One Benefit Concert, a rollicking, dazzling performance from him and Yoko Ono. Director Kevin Macdonald’s riveting documentary One to One: John & Yoko takes that epic musical event and uses it as the starting point to recreate eighteen defining months in the lives of John and Yoko.
By 1971 the couple was newly arrived in the United States - living in a tiny apartment in Greenwich Village and watching a huge amount of American television. The film uses a riotous mélange of American TV to conjure the era through what the two would have been seeing on the tube: the Vietnam War, The Price is Right, Nixon, Coca-Cola ads, Cronkite, The Waltons. As they experience a year of love and transformation in the US, John and Yoko begin to change their approach to protest - ultimately leading to the One to One concert.
The Garden Cinema View:
It been only a couple of months since the star-studded A Complete Unknown galvanised Bob Dylan as an enigma, floating above politics and counter culture in pre-Summer of Love NYC. Now in this documentary-concert-film-hybrid, Kevin MacDonald finds another musical icon embedded into the Greenwich Village scene, but one trying to shed his mythical image, to step away from being ‘your monument’ (as Yoko Ono calls him), and involve himself in grassroots protest movements.
This is a generous portrait of Lennon, told through archival material and some very powerful concert footage. To a degree, Ono feels like a supporting character here, but McDonald does transmit her talents as unique artist and committed activist, rather than the Beatles-disrupter that she is sometimes (at least in the 70s) dismissed as.
The TV show/adverts montage device that MacDonald deploys drags after a while, but the rest of the documentary provides an amazing snapshot of this period in history, and some spine-tingling musical performances.
