If there was anyone who was going to know the power of a song, it would be John Lennon, but even he might’ve been surprised by what he could accomplish after quickly jotting down a few lyrics for the song “John Sinclair” after learning that the activist and one-time manager for the MC5 faced 10 years in prison for marijuana charges after being arrested in 1969. In “One to One: John and Yoko,” it surprisingly doesn’t feel like too much to ask of Lennon, shown to lend whatever he could to causes he believed in after leaving the Beatles and living a pared-down life with Yoko Ono in New York, but after promising his manager Allen Klein, “All we’ll do is one song and leave” at a concert arranged for Sinclair’s release in 1971 at the urging of Jerry Rubin, the subsequent pressure applied by the 50,000 people at the arena that night to see him led to Sinclair ultimately only spending only two nights in prison.
When making an impact seemed to come effortlessly to Lennon, the best tribute of all in Kevin MacDonald’s stirring celebration of the 18 months that the singer/songwriter and his partner spent living in a two-bedroom loft in Greenwich Village is that it’s never overworked, capturing the couple’s fervent desire to make a difference in the world while keeping their own footprint small otherwise as a trapping of Lennon’s enormous fame. With the belief that someone might be listening in on their phone calls, an unbelievable cache of private conversations are available to MacDonald and co-director Sam Rice-Edwards to hear Lennon and Ono confer with their inner circle. Yet the inspired filmmaking choice that really opens up “One to One” comes from an interview Lennon gave about how he and Ono would watch television all the time when going outside was a luxury, leading MacDonald and Rice-Edwards to present the entirely archival-based project as if you were flipping the channels along with the couple, with their own activism shaped by what they see, interspersed with performances from their 1972 benefit concert “One to One” at Madison Square Garden.
You know the film is going to go hard when a rousing rendition of “Come Together” from that show is deployed at neither the beginning or the end when most would need its energy, but “One to One” is electric throughout and there’s real elegance in how Rice-Edwards, serving also as the film’s editor, weaves together rare footage of Lennon and Ono and more common imagery of the times, ranging from ads for Ragu and a state-of-the-art electric calculator (offered for the low, low price of $345) to scenes of Vietnam and the Attica riots on the nightly news. “One to One” builds to major individual crescendos when songs played at the “One to One” concert are brought together with their likely inspirations from both Lennon and Ono’s personal lives and political consciousness, but by moving back and forth, the film creates real excitement as one can intuit Lennon and Ono’s confidence grow in how much of a difference they can make, first seeing the effect they have with the immediate release of Sinclair and plotting an entire national tour with Rubin called “Free the People” where the plan was to contribute proceeds to bailing out the incarcerated.
Although that tour never came to be when Rubin’s more aggressive tactics made Lennon and Ono question their partnership, “One to One” makes a strong case for the driving forces behind how Lennon would spend what would be his final years, devoting himself so fully to causes he believed in, wrestling with ideas of becoming a family man before settling down as he and Ono pursued her daughter Kyoko from a previous marriage and fought for U.S. citizenship after being threatened with deportation. A bit like “The Last Dance” recently reminded the current generation of basketball fans of what Michael Jordan was actually like in his prime after being called a legend so long that it could underplay his greatness, “One to One” restores Lennon to similar status for the general public with archival footage so crisply revived that looks like it could’ve been shot yesterday and its subjects still appearing ahead of their time.
“One to One: John & Yoko” will screen next at the Venice Film Festival on August 30th at 1:50 pm at the Sala Grande and August 31st at 4:45 pm at Sala Volpe and at the Astra 2 at 7:30 pm and 9 pm.