Film Of The Week: One to One: John & Yoko - Reviewed by Roe McDermott

Kevin MacDonald has long gravitated toward stories at the intersection of the personal and the political, where lives are reshaped by history’s upheavals and media becomes both witness and weapon. Whether scaling icy peaks in Touching the Void, chronicling dictatorship in The Last King of Scotland, or unravelling pop icons in Whitney and Marley, MacDonald approaches his subjects with a fascination for extremity - emotional, physical, or cultural. He tends to layer archival fragments into a tense, moving collage, eschewing neat takeaways in favour of atmosphere and accumulation.

That sensibility takes on a more immersive form in One to One: John & Yoko, co-directed with Sam Rice-Edwards. There’s no narrator, interviews, or guiding voice giving explanation and exposition. Instead, the film plunges the viewer into an unrelenting stream of archival footage - live performances, home movies, news clippings, bureaucratic documents, conceptual art, and protest recordings. That structure isn’t just an aesthetic choice - it’s a reflection of John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s media-saturated reality. They famously watched an enormous amount of television. For them, TV was a kind of found art - a place where culture revealed itself in flashes, contradictions, and absurdities.

The film adopts that same sensibility. We move from home movie to war report, from remastered concert footage to absurdist performance art, from bureaucratic memos to ad jingles and news anchors intoning doom. It plays like a channel-hopping portrait of America in the early 1970s, as we glimpse the shape of the era through Vietnam war coverage, Watergate paranoia, protest marches, Nixon’s grimace on the nightly news and the rapid churn of pop culture trying to sell, soothe, and distract.

The main event of the film is the August 30, 1972 One to One benefit concert at Madison Square Garden. It was Lennon’s first and last full-length live performance as a solo artist after the Beatles, and the newly remastered footage gives it a force and clarity it’s never had before. The concert pulses with urgency, Lennon riveting as he rips through ‘Come Together’, ‘New York City’, and a raw, exposed rendition of ‘Mother.’ Yoko Ono’s set, which includes the cathartic, unrelenting ‘Don’t Worry Kyoko,’ is wilder, stranger and more confrontational. But what gives that performance its depth is the context the film builds around it: the personal and political atmosphere that led Lennon and Ono to believe that art and activism were inseparable.

That belief is the film’s true subject. One to One doesn't document the polish of celebrity activism, but its raw, messy engine. Lennon and Ono are constantly trying, broadcasting and adjusting the signal. The film shows two artists living in real time, improvising a shared language of protest and performance, sometimes clumsily and naively, but trying nonetheless. Threaded through it is a quieter narrative of surveillance and repression. The Nixon administration, unnerved by Lennon’s growing connections with anti-war organisers and countercultural figures, launched an aggressive campaign to deport him. We see this unfold through memos, photos and phone taps (a depressingly prescient thread today as Trump cracks down on critics, activists and artists). It’s a reminder that, while Lennon and Ono were often dismissed as naïve or unserious, their attempt to transform pop culture into a tool for protest was met with genuine institutional resistance.

The representation of Ono is refreshing in how it rejects the narratives that have historically been used to attack her. She is not an accessory to Lennon’s arc here, or a muse or a scapegoat. We see how her artistry and unwillingness to compromise becomes a flashpoint for backlash. The racism and misogyny that met her in the public eye lingers here too, not in heavy-handed exposition but in the ambient noise of media coverage and audience reaction. (Though for those unfamiliar with Ono’s work, her art suffers from the lack of explanation in the film. Long interludes about flies, in particular, might be confusing.)

Lennon is charming and disoriented, trying to figure out who he is post-Beatles, and how he can use his power. There’s something endearing and vulnerable in the way he stumbles through political conversations, sometimes unsure, sometimes overconfident, often contradictory, but never cynical. We see the desire to be both radical and adored, the weariness of fame and the draw of its power.

One to One doesn’t pretend that Lennon and Ono succeeded in changing the world, or that they always knew what they were doing. What it offers instead is something more resonant: a portrait of two people refusing to separate their love from their politics and their art from their lives. It captures the noise, the friction, the idealism and the failure. It’s a film about process, not product; about the kind of restless, utopian energy that isn’t perfect but we still need more of.

It asks a question that Lennon and Ono often did, one that we need to remember: What if the point wasn’t perfection? What if the point was presence? What if being loud, together, was enough?

• Out now. Watch the trailer below: