If a cross-section of documentary filmmakers were offered access to live performances, behind-the-scenes footage and even private phone calls during a couple of years in the life and career of John Lennon, it’s unlikely that many of them would choose the period of 1971-1972. That was when Lennon and his wife, Yoko Ono, got heavily into political causes and made “Some Time in New York City,” an unwieldy and hamfisted slice of rock ‘n’ roll agitprop that long ago secured its reputation as the worst album of Lennon’s career.
But that’s the period that director Kevin Macdonald and co-director Sam Rice-Edwards had to work with to make “One to One: John & Yoko,” which had its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival on Friday and will also play in Telluride this weekend. The filmmakers have managed to make a bracing, scattered and somewhat revelatory look at a period that’ll go down as a misstep in which the Smart Beatle was fumbling to figure out what to do and intermittently coming up with a satisfactory answer.
Fortunately for Macdonald (“The Last King of Scotland,” “One Day in September”), one of the highlights of the period was the One to One benefit concert that took place at Madison Square Garden on Aug. 30, 1972, the only full-length concert Lennon gave after leaving the Beatles. (In truth, it was two concerts, with separate afternoon and evening shows, but the film treats it like a single show.)
The film includes eight of the performances from those shows, which have been released in a few formats over the years but have now been remastered with the music produced by Sean Ono Lennon, the son of Lennon and Yoko Ono. The fierce and raw renditions of “Come Together,” “Instant Karma,” “Cold Turkey,” “Mother” and other songs are exhilarating in their roughness, and a gentle version of “Imagine” strips away the years of all-purpose anthem-hood that have calcified what was once a pretty subversive song. (It’s also cool to watch Lennon chewing gum between lines.)
If the concert(s) serves as an indispensable spine of “One to One,” what surrounds them is both bolder and at times more tiring. The film is set during a time when Lennon and Ono had left London and moved to New York City, living in what Lennon says was a two-room apartment in Greenwich Village. They famously spent lots of time in bed and lots of time watching television, so the film continually returns to a two-room set with appropriately rumpled sheets and bright screens.
And television becomes the delivery system for the film’s framework: “One to One” is edited to resemble a remote-controlled TV set with a remote in the hands of a hyperactive information junkie. In between the longer segments with Lennon and Ono, we get a barrage of images, 50-year-old TV commercials, news stories and snippets of programming. A news story about Richard Nixon might cut to the then-infamous A.J. Weberman going through Bob Dylan’s garbage, then to coverage of the Attica prison riot, then to a bit from “The Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour” and then to a vintage commercial before ending up with John and Yoko co-hosting “The Mike Douglas Show” and bringing out social activist Jerry Rubin to berate Douglas and the audience.
It’s a dizzying way to put John and Yoko in context, but it was a dizzying period. Nixon, wildly unpopular with the youth audience, was running for re-election as the war in Vietnam escalated and as word began to spread about a two-bit break-in scandal at Democratic headquarters in a Washington building known as Watergate. The revolutionary spirit that had been full of idealism and vigor in the 1960s was still alive, but turning darker and more violent once its former adherents figured out that a platform of “peace and love” hadn’t accomplished much.
In New York, John and Yoko fell in with Rubin, Abbie Hoffman, John Sinclair and others, and began planning events to help stop the bombing, end the war and achieve an array of other goals. For a while, Lennon was avidly behind the idea of a “Free the People” tour in which he and Yoko (and maybe Bob Dylan!) would join Rubin, Hoffman and others. In one of the many phone conversations taped by Lennon and used in the film, he tells manager Allen Klein that they’ll spend $10,000 in each city bailing as many people out of jail as they can. “That’s a great idea!” says Klein, whose own shady business practices would eventually land him in jail for a couple of months.
But Lennon and Ono became disillusioned with their revolutionary buddies, with Lennon telling one reporter in another phone conversation that Rubin and Hoffman wanted “to create death and destruction” at the Republican Convention in Miami in the summer of 1972. They canceled the Free the People tour and instead did the One to One benefits on behalf of the notorious Willowbrook State School for children with intellectual disabilities – though the editing of the film is a little misleading in the way it pairs the protests and riots during the convention with a ferocious version of “Cold Turkey” at the concert. With the fury of Lennon’s performance matching the fury on the Miami streets, there’s almost an implication that the two were part of the same movement, rather than the concert being Lennon’s way of distancing himself from the revolutionaries.
There are other curious juxtapositions, including a subsequent one that uses Lennon’s experience with Primal Scream Therapy – which he’d been through two years and two albums earlier – to lead into a live performance of “Mother.” But ultimately, the frantic nature of the change-the-channel framing device fades into the background and the focus settles on moments of insight from the conversations we overhear.
And, of course, there’s the music, which is consistently moving whether it’s the sheer exuberance of Lennon’s version of “Hound Dog,” the gentle beauty of “Imagine” (which does come across as a pointed rejoinder to the heated agitprop that had surrounded Lennon) or the painful introspection of Ono’s ballad “Looking Over From My Hotel Window,” which sadly doesn’t have any onstage footage to go with its audio.
The movie ends by saying that the couple left Greenwich Village in 1973 and moved to the Dakota on the Upper West Side, and that they learned in 1975 that Lennon would not be deported only days before their son Sean was born. It leaves out the 18-month “lost weekend” in which Lennon and Ono were apart between those events, but there’s not much reason to bring up hard times to come when things can come to a close with the graceful strains of “#9 Dream” and the playful idealism of “Bring on the Lucie (Freeda People).”
Scattered and punchy, frustrating and rewarding, “One to One: John & Yoko” doesn’t have the best period of its subjects’ lives and careers to work with. But maybe this odd, chaotic two-year period is an appropriate way to sum up a couple of restless artists, activists and lovers, who found a home in the odd chaos of this particular time in New York City.