One to One: John & Yoko

In August of 1972, John Lennon and Yoko Ono performed in a concert at Madison Square Garden. This was a benefit for mentally disabled people, in response to a recent TV program that had exposed neglect and abuse of patients at the Willowbrook hospital in Staten Island. Well, as it turned out, this was the only full-length concert that John Lennon would do in the years after the Beatles disbanded. He showed up as guests in other people’s concerts, or in brief gigs, but this show was headlined by him and Yoko, and included other artists as well, including Stevie Wonder and Roberta Flack. The recording was eventually made into an album released in 1986, after Lennon’s death, called “Live in New York City.” But now film from that concert, with an excellent soundtrack remastered by Lennon’s son Sean Ono Lennon, has emerged in a new documentary entitled One to One: John & Yoko.

This could have just been made into a concert film, which considering the quality of the sound and image, would have been fine. But veteran director Kevin Macdonald, famed for his innovative documentaries, is the leading creative spark behind this movie, and he decided to use the concert as a kind of focal point for that brief tumultuous period in America, 1971 and ‘72, when John & Yoko first moved to New York and became part of a vital artistic and political scene there.

We open with Lennon’s rocker “New York City,” in a dynamic performance with his band at the time, Elephant’s Memory. Interwoven with the songs, which include breathtaking versions of Instant Karma, Imagine and Mother, is a fascinating collection of footage and audio excerpts from that period. Macdonald’s starting point is John & Yoko’s moving into a Greenwich Village apartment in 1971, where they would spend a lot of time watching TV. A collage of amusing TV ads and parts of various shows of that time is accompanied by news clips of a nation going through some difficult changes.

We see that the Vietnam War was still raging. We watch coverage of the uprising at Attica State Prison in ’71, about which Lennon wrote a song. In contrast to the countercultural movement, we see lots of Richard Nixon and his campaign for reelection in ’72, and George Wallace running for president again, and getting shot, and too many other events to mention. Macdonald’s tapestry includes the great and the trivial, and there are funny excerpts from phone calls between John, Yoko, and various other people in their lives. It’s a fiercely evocative portrait, both joyous and sad in retrospect, of this remarkable time.

In leaving the Beatles, John sought to discover who he really was, unimaginable fame having sort of frozen him into a life that didn’t feel free. Yoko Ono wasn’t just someone he fell in love with. She was an experimental artist, part of a vibrant avant-garde movement that awakened something in Lennon that felt to him like a new birth. His awareness became radical, and in Yoko he found a partner that could see him and help him realize his potential.

One to One: John & Yoko is essential viewing for those who want to get to know the power of these two amazing people, and to reckon with a time when millions were crying out to just give peace a chance.