Stunning Trump Parallels Dominate New John Lennon Film

You’re probably asking yourself, “Does the world really need another John & Yoko documentary?” Perhaps surprisingly, the answer is a resounding yes, at least where One to One: John & Yoko, out April 11 in IMAX, is concerned.

Past documentaries typically dealt with long sections of John Lennon’s life, and the couple’s fight for acceptance amid the breakup of the Beatles—like 1988’s Imagine: John Lennon and the excellent PBS American Masters Lennon NYC, from 2010. Or even focused on a particular time and creative venture—like 2008’s Classic Albums: John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band and the marvelous John & Yoko: Above Us Only Sky, from 2018, which centered on the making of Lennon’s Imagine album, and his blossoming creative partnership with Yoko Ono.

And those are just a few of the deep dives into Lennon and Ono’s art and relationship since the former Beatle’s murder in 1980, meaning there’s no shortage of information on just about every facet of the couple’s nearly 15-year association.

So, you’d be forgiven for thinking that One to One, by ace filmmaker Kevin Macdonald, is just another in a long line of myth-making features, especially since the 2008 film The U.S. v. John Lennon covers much of the same period (albeit in a largely unsatisfying way). The focus on both docs is the 18 months between 1971 and 1973, when Lennon and Ono decamped from their massive country estate in England for a two-room apartment in New York City’s Greenwich Village, immersed themselves in the counterculture anti-Vietnam War movement, made agitprop music and raised the ire of the paranoid and corrupt Richard Nixon administration, leading to a long and emotional deportation fight. But you’d also be wrong.

“When I was approached by the producers about doing the film, I thought, ‘I don’t know, what else is there to do? What is there to say.’ Then I saw the footage of the One to One concert,” says Macdonald. “And then I heard an interview that John gave, where he talked about how, when he first arrived in America, he was obsessed with TV, and he learned about the country through watching TV. And I thought, “Okay, wow, I’ve got the idea. I’m going to make a film that’s not just about John Lennon and Yoko Ono but is about the times and about the world that you see through experiencing it on TV.”

And that’s what’s so exciting about One to One: The footage of Lennon and Ono performing a charity show at Madison Square Garden in August 1972 on behalf of grossly neglected special needs children is immensely powerful and evocative. But One to One is hardly just a concert film. Macdonald immediately evokes the mood of political unrest and information overload that Lennon and Ono stepped into when they arrived in New York City, through rapid fire video of news clips, television commercials and pop culture shows contemporaneous to the time, much in the way Lennon, an admitted TV junkie, consumed the new culture he found himself in.

That so much of what we see on the screen—anti-war protesters being beaten by police, bloviating, out of touch politicians, on-air assassination attempts, and, of course, the pair’s own fight against their deportation for nothing more than exercising their right to free speech—mirrors our own times in such perceptive and even terrifying ways, just makes One to One hit even harder.

“It’s worse now, much worse,” says Adam Ippolito, who played keyboards in the Plastic Ono Elephants Memory Band, recorded with Lennon and Ono during the period, and backed them at Madison Square Garden. “But of course it makes me think of John. There have been a number of good presidents—or at least presidents who didn’t hurt the country or democracy—but Nixon and Trump just seem to have a need to crush all dissent, and John was in Nixon’s crosshairs, because he was a powerful voice against the establishment. And so, just like Trump is doing today, they tried to deport him, especially when they got wind that he was planning a tour of America to mobilize and register young people, who had just gotten the right to vote.”

It’s a fascinating and little-known facet of Lennon’s political activism, that his planned U.S. tour with Ono and Elephants Memory, with periodic appearances by Bob Dylan, and guest speakers like the activists Jerry Rubin, Abbie Hoffman, Rennie Davis and members of the Black Panthers, was built around getting anyone over 18—who had just been given the right to vote by the 26th Amendment—registered and primed to vote against Nixon in that November’s presidential election. Much like the chilling of the on-campus protest going on today, deporting Lennon sent a powerful message to Americans, both young and old.

“The whole period, and what they were doing, represents something deeper happening in the culture,” Sean Ono Lennon tells the Daily Beast of his parents’ high-profile activism, and the reception it was met with by the establishment. “There was a revolution happening. Maybe flower power wasn’t enough, because flower power was just about having fun and breaking down barriers and dressing and freeing our minds. And I think they realized, ‘Maybe we actually have to overthrow power structures and try to stop the war in Vietnam.’ Then everything got more serious.”

“Their phones were tapped, and they were being followed,” Gary Van Scyoc, the bass player in Elephants Memory recalls. “There always seemed to be telephone repairmen in the basement of their building, and there were obviously FBI agents watching them, no matter where they were or what they were doing. I know it made them paranoid. It was scary. It made us all paranoid. It was a whole other level to the usual harassment we were used to in the [anti-war] movement.”

With Lennon and Ono’s deportation fight taking a dark turn, plus the added urgency of Ono searching the U.S. in vain for her daughter from her first marriage, eventually the idea for the tour fell apart.

“They also started to have real disagreements with Jerry Rubin,” Macdonald says. “They were waking up to the negative side of what he did, because he started advocating for violent resistance, and John and Yoko wanted no part of that.”

“They realized that they were hanging out with some people who maybe they didn’t want to be hanging out with,” Sean adds. “Like when Jerry Rubin told them he wanted to bomb the Republican convention? That was something completely against their philosophy.”

Lennon and Ono’s lives are two of the most documented of the late 20th Century. But Macdonald doesn’t simply rely on the typical documentary fare of news clips and interviews from the period. He digs deep into the couple’s own archive.

The pair filmed huge swaths of their everyday lives and, once they were being surveilled by J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI at Nixon’s request, they began recording their phone calls, so they’d “have a record of whatever the FBI has,” as Lennon puts it in the film. It adds another layer to the in-the-moment nature of One to One that is indispensable to understanding the everyday lives of one of the world’s most famous couples, particularly against the framing of today’s political battles.

“You can see it unfold in the film. They felt like they no longer had the adoration of the public,” says Sean. “But then, also, their lives became really terrifying—with their phones tapped and all this stuff—so, I think all of that leads to my dad saying, ‘I think maybe we went too far with these people.’ They learned a real lesson, that the ideals of the radical left were very different to their own. And so, my dad and mom both needed to step away from that. But, of course, that led to the concert at Madison Square Garden.”

The footage of the performance, which punctuates the film, previously seen only in a poor quality 1986 home video release, is a tour de force. The concert is now as crisp and clear as if it were shot yesterday, and the musical performances (which include guest appearances by Stevie Wonder and Roberta Flack, and a powerful version of Ono’s “Don’t Worry Kyoko”), remixed from the original multitrack tapes by Sean Lennon—a sampler of which will be released for Record Store Day, with a box set due in the fall in time for what would have been Lennon’s 85th birthday—are incendiary.

Fittingly born from Lennon and Ono seeing an exposé on television of the barbaric conditions at Willowbrook Hospital on Staten Island, where special needs children were housed in overcrowded, disease-ridden circumstances, the film climaxes with Lennon’s performance of “Imagine,” set against a reunion in Central Park between those children and their parents, the first fruits of the $1.5 million the concerts raised.

As the film winds down, we witness Yoko—who comes across as astute, strong and hugely sympathetic in the film—as she travels to Harvard for the First International Feminist Conference, with John in tow, merely a supportive bystander, in never-before-seen footage. Again, with many echoes of today, we get to see them as just another couple, trying to find their way together, in a complicated and politically charged world, before the film wraps on a sweet note, with the birth of Sean.

“The times informed my mother, and through my mother, my own worldview about things like activism and what the ‘70s represented, and the good and the bad of all of it,” Sean says of his perspective on the events depicted in One to One. “Essentially, she learned that you cannot endanger yourself and your family for the sake of any cause if you want to keep fighting the good fight. Because all of that stuff that happened in the ‘70s was sort of a prelude to, or at least led up to, a lot of things that were happening during my childhood.”

“The experiences she shared with me, in a way, helped me process a lot of that stuff, like this guy from the FBI showing up, saying he wanted to protect us after my dad passed away, and then stealing my dad’s diaries and glasses, and lots of weird, chaotic stuff like that, that felt like echoes of the period,” he continues. “It slowly evaporated, in terms of people’s interest in us, in the late-‘80s and early-‘90s, with a whole new crop of celebrities for people to obsess over, and my life got more normal after that. But my childhood was pretty bizarre, and I think a lot of the origins of the weirdness is in the events that happen in the film.”