One to One: John & Yoko review – another day, another Beatle doc

One day, there’ll be a documentary for every footnote in the story of The Beatles. Bringing us one step closer to that eventuality is One to One: John & Yoko, a heady jaunt through Lennon and Ono’s first 18 months living in New York City in the early ’70s. The story goes that the couple spent much of this period in bed watching television, yet in reality they were feverishly active, lending their voice and fame to the political counterculture.

Nevertheless, directors Kevin Macdonald and Sam Rice-Edwards use that bedbound image as the aesthetic north star, returning time and again to a reconstruction of the couple’s cluttered Greenwich Village apartment, and adopting a freewheeling, ‘channel-flipping’ approach to the edit. The flurry of talk show clips, adverts, news reports, recorded conversations and concert performances is information overload; a dizzying evocation of how urgent and immediate the cultural moment must have felt to a newly minted New Yorker.

Macdonald has succeeded in the past with cradle-to-the-grave musical bio-docs such as 2012’s Marley and 2018’s Whitney, but here he and Rice-Edwards struggle to find a similar significance in such a short slice of Lennon’s life. One to One can only poke at the conflicts and crossovers between pop and politics, and sketch an impression of Lennon’s urge to find cause and community during this period in his career. A more ambivalent approach might have yielded some intriguing insights, but this is a propulsive, Estate-approved project, complete with a triumphant ending montage that takes Lennon from the Village to the Dakota Building and into semi-retirement as a professional dad in 1975.

The blinkers are very much on, and that’s never more apparent than in the way the film deals with Lennon’s music. ‘Some Time in New York City’, the contemporaneous album of straightforward protest songs, is curiously overlooked. Frankly, it’s no-one’s favourite Lennon-Ono LP: it was a commercial failure, it garnered John the worst reviews of his career. Yet even the vivid Madison Square Garden concert footage, remastered for this production, is often buried in the mix, as if the film itself is unconvinced of its merits. On stage, Lennon is every inch an icon, but the perfunctory run-throughs of ‘Come Together’, ‘Imagine’ and ‘Instant Karma’ are only worthy of note because they come from the musician’s final full-length performance.

However inadvertently, One to One captures the point where Lennon, once so ahead of the curve, starts to fade into legend. Glimpses of the likes of Angela Davis and Jane Fonda give us more convincing models of revolutionary activism – but there’s one closer to home, too. While she shares title billing, Ono is still framed in relation to her husband. And yet, even in passing, she emerges as an engaged, inscrutable and passionate artist: creatively confident where John seems adrift. A caterwauling rendition of the avant-rock jam, ‘Don’t Worry Kyoko’, contextualised here with references to Ono’s heartbreaking estrangement from her daughter, blows Lennon’s wannabe Dylan schtick out of the water. Where’s her doc?