A New Yorker calls into a radio show, speaking to former Beatle John Lennon shortly after dawn. “I feel… I feel as though I’m speaking to a myth.” Lennon jumps in: “A myth? Myth World or Myth Universe?” That’s the best joke I’ve heard at the movies this year, and it’s nearly May—to be fair, few could or can match Lennon’s quick wit and aptitude for wordplay. For all the reams and reams that’ve been written about Bob Dylan’s lyrical genius, Lennon rarely gets any credit now for his writing. Dylan’s Tarantula, speed-freak gibberish “novel” released in 1967, isn’t a patch on Lennon’s early books, A Spaniard in the Works and In His Own Write. Although these books were part of the merchandising mania that followed The Beatles’ stateside debut in early-1964, they have some merit that Beatles wigs and boardgames never did.
But it was never the books, or even the political activism, that drew people to John Lennon—it was his music. WOW, WHAT AN INSIGHT! Unfortunately, it’s too easy to forget now, a decade after the popular imagination pegged him as a wife-beater and nothing else; maybe now that Dylan’s been reintroduced to people born in the 21st century, the blithe dismissal of Lennon will recede. Kevin Macdonald’s documentary One to One: John & Yoko likely wouldn’t have been distributed or even financed in the 2010s, but now the movie is playing to mostly empty theaters scattered across the country, making its belated and final theatrical run a year after its premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival. Like 2022’s Bowie documentary Moonage Daydream, Macdonald’s film is mostly made up of archival footage and news broadcasts that, for the most part, are readily available on YouTube.
I love The Beatles. I love John Lennon. I can’t say that One to One has anything revelatory, or even new—well, maybe the phone calls between Lennon, Ono, and all of their “people.” Particularly amusing is Allen Klein, trying to get Lennon to skip a concert for marijuana cause celebrè John Sinclair. “I’ll play ‘Attica State.’” “Why don’t you play ‘Luck of the Irish’?” “What’s wrong with ‘Attica State’?” Under his breath, Klein sarcastically echoes Lennon—“What’s wrong with ‘Attica State’?”—before resuming placating his client. These phone calls are remarkably clear, but even more striking is the footage of a recreation of Lennon and Ono’s Greenwich Village apartment. This set is used to break up the archival footage, a place to put voiceovers while the camera slowly dollies into the bed, or the television. The problem is it all looks too good: this was the first time I thought something in a movie might be completely AI-generated. Even if it isn’t, it’s a dead set, obviously empty of people, totally at odds with the vibrant and volatile material it frames.
But there are forgotten characters resurfaced: AJ Weberman, head of the Bob Dylan fan club, and the reason why Dylan refused to tour with Lennon and Ono (and Jerry Rubin) on a “Free the People” tour where they would bail 500 people out of the jail of whatever town they were playing in. Weberman wasn’t just publicly criticizing “capitalist multimillionaire” Dylan, he was also going through the guy’s garbage. That footage is included in the movie—Weberman finds a syringe and, even more troublesome, a copy of yesterday’s Daily News. “Ah, The Daily News. That explains a lot of Dylan’s politics lately.” Also forgotten is that Lennon and Ono’s titular “One to One” Madison Square Garden concert was ostensibly given to benefit the children of the Willowbrook Institution that Geraldo Rivera had just exposed. After being followed, surveilled, and harassed, Lennon and Ono distance themselves from Rubin and fall into their deportation crisis; “baking bread” in the Dakota was likely the only way they saw out of a forcible deportation along the lines of Charles Chaplin, who’s early-1970s return to America is also featured in the film.
One to One: John & Yoko isn’t a substantive documentary like those by Brett Morgen or Alex Gibney or Matt Wolf, but for any Beatles fan, it’s more compelling than yet another piece on 1964, or that duller than dull Peter Jackson documentary. It reminded me of J. Hoberman’s The Dream Life, although not nearly as good: merely by moving through the 18 months that Lennon and Ono spent in Greenwich Village, Macdonald captures some measure of the chaos, paranoia, and vitriol of the early-1970s in America. George Wallace, Shirley Chisolm, Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Angela Davis, and Walter Cronkite get far more screen time than Lennon and Ono’s musical peers, and, surprisingly, only a few songs from the Madison Square Garden concert are featured.
One to One: John & Yoko isn’t an accomplished documentary, and while it feels prefab at times, there’s an undeniable reality to the material that simply doesn’t exist in Ron Howard’s Beatles documentary, or the abominable A Complete Unknown. I wonder if Sam Mendes’ Lennon movie will reach the early-1970s; either way, I doubt it’ll be worth anything at all.
—Follow Nicky Otis Smith on Twitter: @MonicaQuibbits