Allen Ginsberg, Allen Klein, documentaries, film festivals, Jerry Rubin, John Lennon, Kevin Macdonald, movies, music, New York City, One to One: John and Yoko, reviews, Sam Rice-Edwards, Sundance, Sundance Film Festival, Telluride Film Festival, Venice International Film Festival, Yoko Ono
April 10, 2025
by Carla Hay
Directed by Kevin Macdonald; co-directed by Sam Rice-Edwards
Culture Representation: Taking place from 1971 to 1973, primarily in New York City, the documentary film “One to One: John & Yoko” features a predominantly white group of people (with a few Asians, Latin people and African Americans) discussing the period of time when John Lennon and his wife Yoko Ono were outspoken sociopolitical activists during the first few years that they lived in New York City.
Culture Clash: Lennon’s and Ono’s left-wing liberal political views and the couple’s celebrity influence made them targets of the right-wing conservative then-U.S. President Richard Nixon, whose administration put the couple under surveillance and immigration scrutiny.
Culture Audience: “One to One: John & Yoko” will appeal primarily to people who are fans of Lennon, Ono, the Beatles and documentaries about rock music, pop culture and political activism in the 1970s.
“One to One: John & Yoko” is named after the One to One charity concerts (headlined by spouses John Lennon and Yoko Ono, a member of the Plastic Ono Elephant’s Memory Band) that took place on August 30, 1972 at New York City’s Madison Square Garden, as a fundraiser for the Willowbrook State School for disabled children. There were two concerts for the event: one concert was held in the afternoon, and the other concert was held in the evening. Die-hard fans will already be familiar with many of the concert performances in the documentary. The movie is more interesting with its previously unreleased archival material, such as recordings of John Lennon’s and Yoko Ono’s phone conversations. In this all-archival documentary, the concert footage is prominent, but it’s not the main purpose of the film.
Directed by Kevin Macdonald, “One to One: John & Yoko” had its world premiere at the 2024 Venice International Film Festival and subsequently had screenings at the 2024 Telluride Film Festival and the 2025 Sundance Film Festival. The One to One concert performances were not only Lennon’s first full-length concerts as a solo artist after the 1970 breakup for Lennon’s former band The Beatles but the concerts were also Lennon’s last public performances where he did a full set of songs. Highlights from Lennon’s performances at the One to One concerts were released in 1986 as a John Lennon album and home video titled “Live in New York City.”
“One to One: John & Yoko” features restored and remastered concert footage that includes Ono performing “Don’t Worry Kyoko (Mummy’s Only Looking for Her Hand in the Snow),” a song that was not in the “Live in New York City” compilation. Sean Ono Lennon (the son of Lennon and Ono) produced and remixed the documentary’s score music and serves as one of the movie’s executive producers. Sam Rice-Edwards co-directed and edited “One to One: John & Yoko,” which has Macdonald, Peter Worsley and Alice Ebb as producers. Other performers at the One to One concerts included Stevie Wonder, Roberta Flack, Melanie Safka (also known as just Melanie) and Sha Na Na, but they are only seen in this documentary in the all-star finale when Lennon led a sing-along of “Give Peace a Chance.”
The documentary aims to serve as a time capsule of what was going on in the lives of Lennon and Ono (who got married in 1969) during the years 1971 to 1973, the first years that the couple made New York City their main home base. Lennon (who was born and raised in England) and Ono (who was born and raised in Japan) still maintained a home in England throughout their marriage. On December 8, 1980, Lennon (at the age of 40) was tragically murdered by a lone gunman outside of Lennon’s home in New York City. Lennon’s murderer was sentenced to life in prison.
Lennon and Ono said in interviews that they spent of a lot of their free time watching TV. The documentary has a clip of Lennon quipping in an interview that TV is “the window of the world.” Much of the documentary consists of news clips and pop culture tidbits to give context to the period of time that’s covered in the movie. Sometimes, the clips are well-edited. Other times, the clips look like a hodgepodge of things thrown together to fill up time in the documentary.
These news clips include coverage of the Vietnam War and the 1971 deadly prison rebellion Attica Correctional Facility in Attica, New York. There’s also footage from TV journalist Geraldo Rivera’s 1972 WABC-TV documentary “Willowbrook: The Last Great Disgrace,” which exposed Willowbrook to be a hellish, understaffed institution that abused and neglected its child residents. Rivera was the person credited with persuading Lennon to perform at the One to One concerts, which were intended to raise money to reform Willowbrook. The pop culture clips, which are less substantial than the news footage, include commercials for Coca-Cola, footage from the TV game show “The Price Is Right” and scenes from the family drama “The Waltons,” which was a popular series at the time.
The documentary also includes clips (video and audio) of interviews that Lennon and Ono did during this time period, including their appearances on “The Mike Douglas Show” and “The Dick Cavett Show.” In various other interviews, Ono talks abut feminism and about the racist bullying, death threats and physical attacks (such as hair pulling and worse) that she received from people who wrongfully blamed her for breaking up the Beatles. Lennon praises Ono for being a strong and creative woman.
Lennon’s attitude about the Beatles was summed up in an interview quote included in the documentary: “I don’t want to recreate the past. I want to be me now.” Ono takes issue with the other former members of the Beatles (Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr) by saying that she doesn’t get enough credit for all the compliments that she gave to the Beatles in the media. Ono bitterly comments that McCartney, Harrison and Starr never gave the same compliments to her in the media.
Lennon and Ono both talk about the emotional pain of not seeing Ono’s daughter Kyoko Cox for years, due to a custody battle that Ono was having with Ono’s ex-husband Tony Cox, who was Kyoko’s father. There is no mention of Lennon’s son Julian, who was living with Lennon’s ex-wife Cynthia at the time. Even though there was no custody battle between Julian’s parents, it’s been well-documented (but not mentioned in this documentary) that Julian had a complicated relationship with his father, whom he felt neglected him during much of Julian’s childhood.
“One to One: John & Yoko” is at its best when it shows the evolution of Lennon and Ono as sociopolitical activists. The couple famously spent their 1969 honeymoon doing a Bed-In for Peace, where they stayed in bed in two separate one-week periods (one week in Montreal, another week in Amsterdam) to promote world peace. By 1971, as residents of the United States, the couple became more outspoken against the controversial Vietnam War. As the documentary points out, it’s one thing for celebrities to speak about their political views. It’s another thing for celebrities to use their influence to make a difference in legal and political situations.
And that’s what Lennon and Ono did when they performed a song at the John Sinclair Freedom Rally, an event for left-wing activist/poet John Sinclair, who was sentenced to 10 years in prison for possession of two marijuana joints. The rally took place at the University of Michigan’s Crisler Arena in Ann Arbor, Michigan, which was Sinclair’s home state. Grammy-winning superstar Wonder, Bob Seger and Phil Ochs were among the other performers at the rally, which was filmed for the televised documentary “Ten for Two: The John Sinclair Freedom Rally.”
As a result of the rally, Sinclair was let out of prison. It put the U.S. government on notice that Lennon and Ono had the power to influence public opinion and outcomes of political oppression. Because of this event and the couple’s other high-profile activism, declassified FBI documents have since confirmed that Lennon and Ono were put under U.S. government surveillance and were targeted for immigrant visa problems. Lennon was threatened with deportation and had to go to court to fight these visa problems. Audio clips from recorded phone calls and interviews reveal that Lennon knew that his private phones were tapped, and the U.S. government was listening in on his conversations.
Lennon’s and Ono’s social circles began to include poet Allen Ginsberg and left-wing activist Jerry Rubin, who co-founded the Youth International Party (YIP), also known as the Yippies. Rubin, who was considered a leader of the counterculture/anti-establishment movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s, became such a close confidante of Lennon and Ono, he convinced them to be part of a Free the People tour (a liberal counterculture event mixing politics and music) that was also supposed to have Bob Dylan as a co-headliner. The tour had been planned to culminate at the 1972 Republican National Convention, which was held in Miami.
Phone conversations between Lennon, Ono, Lennon’s manager Allen Klein reveal some of the behind-the-scenes drama and negotiations involved in the couple’s activism. For the John Sinclair Freedom Rally, Klein can be heard objecting to Lennon’s idea to perform the song “Attica State” (which is on Lennon’s 1972 album “Some Time in New York City”) because Klein thinks it’s too much of a controversial political statement. Lennon compromises and says he’ll do another one of his original songs instead. That song was “John Sinclair,” a song that he wrote specifically for the event. “John Sinclair” is also on “Some Time in New York City” album.
There was even more turmoil over Dylan’s involvement in the Free the People tour. In a phone call, Ono asks writer A.J. Weberman (who has been called outside of this documentary a “Dylanologist,” a “Dylan expert” and a “Dylan stalker”) to stop harassing Dylan because she wants Dylan to do the tour. Weberman says he will make an apology to Dylan. By this time, Dylan was having second thoughts about doing the tour and backed out before any official contracts were signed.
Even though Dylan had a “counterculture” image, he was reportedly wary of how the tour would affect his future business prospects. In the end, the Free the People tour didn’t happen. Lennon and Ono also dropped Rubin from their circle of friends. The documentary has a more diplomatic way of putting it by saying that Lennon and Ono “parted ways” with Rubin.
“One to One: John & Yoko” doesn’t have all the songs featured on “Live in New York City.” In addition to “Give Peace a Chance,” the other songs performed in “One to One: John & Yoko” are “Power to the People”; “Come Together” (a song originally recorded by the Beatles); “Instant Karma (We All Shine On)”; “Hound Dog” (a song originally recorded by Big Mama Thornton and made more famous by Elvis Presley’s version of the song); “Cold Turkey”; “Mother”; and “Imagine.”
An epilogue mentions that in August 1973, Lennon and Ono moved out of their relatively small apartment in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village region to a larger apartment in the luxury Dakota building in Manhattan’s Upper West Side region. This move to the Dakota also marked a new chapter in their lives. The documentary doesn’t mention that not long after Lennon and Ono moved to the Dakota, the couple separated for about 18 months (beginning in the summer of 1973 and ending in early 1975), when he lived mostly in Los Angeles with their personal assistant May Pang, who became Lennon’s mistress because Ono demanded it. Pang’s memoirs and the 2023 documentary “The Lost Weekend: A Love Story” have details about this marital separation period of Lennon’s life, when he self-admittedly was abusing alcohol and drugs.
Because “One to One: John & Yoko” was approved by the Lennon estate, these are the messy details of his life that aren’t going to be in this type of documentary. What is presented in this documentary is undoubtedly carefully curated, but still has some meaning in showing how even a world-famous celebrity as Lennon got backlash because he took risks and stood up for the political causes that meant a lot to him. Ono was a willing partner who also went through her own difficulties. “One to One: John & Yoko” doesn’t try to make Lennon and Ono look perfect but makes them look like two celebrities who were aware of the privileges and burdens of fame and did what they could to make the best of it.
Magnolia Pictures will release “One to One: John & Yoko” in select U.S. cinemas on April 11, 2025.