Oscar winner Kevin Macdonald’s (One Day in September) new film takes its title – and a few electrifying performances – from John Lennon’s only full-length post-Beatles concert, a benefit for a children’s mental hospital. But it’s no concert movie.
It’s 1971, and while Bob Dylan and many other of his contemporaries have abandoned politics for music, John is in a revolutionary mood, despite the growing sense of apathy in post-’60s America. ‘Flower power didn’t work,’ he says, speaking from his adopted home in New York’s village. ‘So what? We start again.’
Drawing on televised interviews, taped phone calls with agents and managers, and personal film footage – much of it new to this film – Macdonald charts the couple’s determination to fight for any worthy cause that crosses their eyeline, from the Vietnam War to fundraising for remanded prisoners unable to afford bail. The pair’s artistry, individually and collectively, seems to be matched only by their energy and moral clarity.
Two things elevate One to One beyond the sum of its fly-on-the-wall intimacy, revolutionary spirit and musical performances (overseen by the couple’s son, Sean Ono Lennon).
The first is its expansive perspective: although chronologically arranged, spanning the year or so leading up to the August 30, 1972 concert, Macdonald places John and Yoko’s personal struggles – death threats, a custody battle, a hostile justice department – within a wider cultural and historical context. He intercuts with news footage, political scandals and TV commercials in a channel-flipping style that would have Adam Curtis nodding approvingly.
Fifty-odd years on, little in America has changed
The second is the way John and Yoko’s socio-political activism highlights the fact that, 50-odd years on, little in America has changed. A corrupt president is in the White House, proxy wars rage, protest is suppressed, political agitators are imprisoned, and would-be revolutionaries have been captured, defanged or murdered. Not only was the revolution John and Yoko yearned to foment not televised, it never materialised.
Sometimes the aperture opens a little too wide, such as the seemingly superfluous stuff with the president of the Bob Dylan Fan Club going through his hero’s bins. But in an age of seemingly endless Beatleology – an eight-part series about the Fab Four’s childhood bedrooms is will doubtless be streaming soon on The Beatles Channel – One to One goes further than fan service for Beatlemaniacs. It’s a document of a febrile time and a wake-up call for a fizzled revolution.
On UK IMAX screens Apr 9. Opening nationwide Apr 11