In ‘One to One: John & Yoko,’ a couple against the world comes into focus

The challenge of the Beatles’ greatness is that it’s so universally assumed — and so relentlessly chronicled — that nothing more need be said about the subject. Even when a fairly major new work comes out, like Peter Jackson’s revelatory 2021 documentary “The Beatles: Get Back,” a certain degree of cultural fatigue immediately undercuts the excitement of never-before-seen footage. With the Fab Four’s legend permanently woven into the fabric of society, what fresh terrain is left to explore? (Not that this would ever stop Hollywood: A quartet of Beatles biopics is due in 2028.)

Kevin Macdonald has directed several documentaries about musical icons, including Bob Marley and Whitney Houston. But with “One to One: John & Yoko,” he doesn’t simply take an intriguing micro-view of his subjects, focusing on 18 crucial months in the lives of John Lennon and Yoko Ono — he ignores the Beatles’ long shadow to look at Lennon independently of the group that made him famous. Aiming for an immersive immediacy, the Oscar-winning documentarian of “One Day in September” tries to sidestep nostalgia, thrusting us back into the early 1970s after the band’s breakup, as Lennon and Ono hole up in a small Greenwich Village apartment, their creativity, political activism and romantic relationship in full bloom. It’s a compelling, occasionally uneven attempt to bring the Beatles back down to Earth by illustrating the humanness of one of its members and the wife he adored.

Structured around the only full-length concert Lennon performed after the Beatles’ dissolution, the documentary peaks with sequences from that benefit show, called One to One, which took place Aug. 30, 1972, at Madison Square Garden. But Macdonald is after more than just a concert film, letting those musical interludes serve as counterpoint to a larger investigation into Lennon and Ono’s mindset at a moment of deep division within American society. Specifically, “One to One” imagines how the copious amount of television the couple absorbed informed their view of the country, the documentary often metaphorically flipping channels between commercials, game shows and news reports on the Vietnam War and Watergate. Presented in Imax, “One to One” overwhelms with this cascade of information, entertainment and consumerism, suggesting that Lennon and Ono’s music and advocacy grew out of that visual maelstrom.

To drive home the project’s intimacy, Macdonald carefully re-creates the couple’s New York apartment, the camera gliding across the space as we hear archival phone conversations. Blessedly, “One to One” never includes Lennon and Ono lookalikes, which makes the empty apartment feel simultaneously lived-in and ghostly. The approach speaks to Macdonald’s overall strategy, which eschews contemporary talking heads or much in the way of onscreen context for the film’s period footage. The movie trusts you know who segregationist George Wallace was, just as you’ll be able to appreciate the joy of seeing an unidentified Stevie Wonder on stage with Lennon. Macdonald doesn’t want us to be awed by history unfolding. Rather, he embeds us in the warm, casual messiness of the couple’s domestic life, underlined most amusingly by a seemingly superfluous subplot involving Ono researching how to obtain live flies for her latest art installation.

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“One to One” spends no time rehashing Lennon’s professional highlights from that era — how his spare, epochal 1970 solo record “Plastic Ono Band” paved the way for the follow-up album “Imagine” about nine months later. Instead, Macdonald provides clips of Lennon and Ono on talk shows discussing their marriage or disparaging his former Beatles bandmates for not standing up for Ono when the press denigrated her. The couple’s day-to-day concerns draw us in, Lennon’s fear of being deported as monumental as Ono’s custody battle for her daughter Kyoko from a previous marriage. (Ono’s struggles inspired her 1969 song “Don’t Worry Kyoko,” which she delivers with blinding intensity during the One to One show.)

But the worrying state of U.S. politics is never far from their mind. Teaming up with counterculture rabble-rouser Jerry Rubin, Lennon and Ono speak of peace and love with a naïveté that is both poignant and inspiring. Much will be made of the documentary’s modern relevance — Nixon’s reactionary right-wing America feels like an opening act for the cruel nation we now inhabit — but there’s a bruised defiance to Lennon’s noting that, while the 1960s’ dream of Flower Power may have failed, a new movement could always spring up in its wake. Lennon’s outrage at the injustices he saw on TV fueled protest songs like “Attica State” and “John Sinclair,” later collected on the album “Some Time in New York City,” which dropped two months before the Madison Square Garden concert. Sadly, his humanism and music weren’t enough to stop America’s creeping conservatism, but by positioning Lennon’s passion as potently present-day, “One to One” argues that the songwriter’s message remains vital, even though its messenger is gone.

If faint whiffs of boomer sentimentality are inescapable, “One to One” at least supplies us with barnburner live versions of “Come Together” and “Instant Karma!” that might make you wonder why the originals aren’t this fiery. That said, the film sometimes succumbs to the tireder tropes of the music-doc genre. Longtime Macdonald collaborator Sam Rice-Edwards, the movie’s editor and co-director, unimaginatively juxtaposes concert performances with news footage. (Shots of Nixon set against Lennon ripping through a cover of “Hound Dog” tell viewers nothing about either.) And while the notion that Lennon and Ono came to understand America through its television programming is provocative, too frequently the collage of grim news and glib ads leans toward the tritely ironic.

The more Macdonald resists mythologizing or summing up, the more John Lennon and Yoko Ono emerge as fragile, complex individuals on a journey together during uncertain times. “One to One” isn’t a salute to the Beatles’ brilliance or Lennon’s genius. Despite the large screens this film will play on, the movie renders its subjects as touchingly life-sized.