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?