It would be wrong to say I had to be driven at gunpoint into the premiere of Kevin Macdonald’s documentary on John Lennon and Yoko Ono at Venice International Film Festival, but even the greatest Beatles fans might admit they had seen quite enough features about the band and its afterlife. Peter Jackson’s absurdly comprehensive Get Back – “Is it still on, mum?” – looked to have killed off that documentary market for good. (Insert your own smart-alec remark here about the incoming Sam Mendes tetralogy.)
Macdonald, working with Sam Rice-Edwards, his editor, immediately punctuates such scepticism with a seat-juddering opening blast of Lennon’s song New York City. It is worth seeing the film in a good cinema for that live audio alone. Originally released in a squelchy mix by Phil Spector, this remastered version of the One to One benefit gig from 1972 – the singer’s first full-length concert after leaving The Beatles – confirms that Lennon was at his best when at his noisiest.
Instant Karma and Come Together also get cacophonous outings. Tolerances have always varied on the emotionally incontinent Mother – again shrieked here – but this is not the place to relitigate that controversy.
The songs take up, however, only a relatively small portion of a film whose main body explores fresh avenues in Lennonology. One to One spends time with the occasionally exhausting ex-Beatle and the impressively tolerant Ono during the 18 months they inhabited a small apartment in New York’s West Village. This was 1971 and 1972, when the world was still processing the cultural changes that Lennon had helped forward. Were the hippie rearrangements going to stick? Supporters of Richard Nixon, then seeking re-election, hoped not.
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We see a fair bit of Lennon bouncing about media outlets willing to trumpet whatever might be his current obsession. But he has confessed that – understandably, given the pressure cooker that was the previous decade – he then spent most of his time watching telly with the missus.
To say that Macdonald, known for first-class documentaries such as One Day in September and Touching the Void, makes the best of this situation is to greatly understate the case. Ploughing through archive footage from those two years, he develops One to One into a wider social history of the United States in all its pre-Watergate delusions. The uprising at Attica state prison is on TV. The Waltons sells the nation an idealised version of the Great Depression. Jerry Rubin, the tireless social activist, is interviewed by Phil Donohue.
The film-makers are equally cunning in their use of previously unreleased phone recordings. One amusing strain has the couple trying to track down a host of live flies for Ono’s upcoming installation. We also get interactions with AJ Weberman, the oddball who devoted much of these years to rooting through Bob Dylan’s bins for evidence of bourgeois hypocrisy (or something).
Though made with the participation of Sean Ono Lennon, John and Yoko’s son, One to One is not afraid to occasionally show the singer in an unflattering light. There is a sense of a man indulgently flitting from one fashionable cause to the next.
But it does ultimately offer plausible redemption, first in his rigorous defence of Ono against the misogynist mob (still around), second in his worthwhile response to a TV report from Geraldo Rivera – then a news man – on horrifying neglect at Willowbrook State School for children with intellectual disabilities. The One to One concerts were a benefit for those young people; if the moving closing shots are to be credited, they made a genuine difference to their wellbeing.
That sequence closes a film that somehow manages to avoid cynicism as it details a country in violent transition. There is always room for a post-Beatles doc if it’s this good and this original.
In cinemas from Friday, April 11th
