The new documentary One to One: John & Yoko follows John Lennon and Yoko Ono at a curious point in their lives: He has left the Beatles, is planning a huge benefit concert for special needs children — and is watching a lot of American TV.
The film covers the 18 months leading up to the August 30, 1972 One to One benefit concert at Madison Square Garden, which Lennon and Ono organized to raise money for children with special needs at the Willowbrook State School.
In the exclusive clip from the documentary above, Lennon performs “Mother,” a song he wrote about feeling abandoned by both his mother and father. His father, Alf, left home when Lennon was an infant, and his mother, Julia, did not live with her son for most of his life, and was killed in a car accident in 1958, when Lennon was 17.
Lennon’s quietly devastating performance begins with him crying out: “Mother, you had me/ but I never had you.” And his emotion builds from there.
One to One Has a Unique Take on John Lennon and Yoko Ono
There have been many documentaries, obviously, about John Lennon, Yoko Ono, and The Beatles, but One to One, by Oscar winning filmmaker Kevin MacDonald, takes a unique approach. It tries to put us in their heads in the early 1970s by showing us the things they watched.
In 1971, Lennon and Ono were living in a tiny apartment in New York City’s Greenwich Village and watching a tremendous amount of American television, at a time when there were just three broadcast networks.
The limited options allow MacDonald to make some reasonable conclusions about what they saw on the screen, including the Vietnam War, The Price is Right, President Richard Nixon, Coca-Cola ads, Walter Cronkite, and The Waltons. Even the One on One concert was inspired by TV: specifically, a Geraldo Rivera exposé, at a time when he was known for crusading journalism.
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The film opened to very positive reviews that noted that it succeeds in bringing audiences closer to the subject than the many films of the past — MacDonald even goes so far as to lovingly duplicate the inside of Lennon and Ono’s Greenwich Village apartment, so that viewers can feel truly at home with the couple.
The film takes place at a particularly interesting and undercovered period of the couple’s lives, when they tried to rediscover themselves as individuals and a couple following the end of The Beatles — and amid widespread criticism of Ono, who was nastily accused of breaking up the beloved band.
Lennon’s campaign against the Vietnam War — which included his famous 1969 “bed-in” demonstration with Ono — had made him an enemy of the Nixon Administration, which spent three years trying to deport him back to his home country, England.
Lennon and Ono separated for 18 months from 1973 to 1975, during which he spent his time between New York and Los Angeles and collaborated with such artists as Harry Nilsson, Elton John and David Bowie.
He then reunited with Ono, and the couple had a son, Sean Lennon, in October of 1975.
John Lennon took a five-year break from publicly making music, and returned to it in 1980 to collaborate with Ono on the album Double Fantasy. He was shot and killed by Mark David Chapman three weeks after the album’s release while returning to his and Ono’s apartment at the Dakota building. Lennon was only 40 when he died.
Yoko Ono, now 92, lives on.
One to One: John & Yoko is now available on video on demand from Magnolia Home Entertainment and HBO Documentary Films.
Main image: John Lennon in One to One: John & Yoko. Magnolia Home Entertainment and HBO Documentary Films.