ONE TO ONE: JOHN & YOKO
On August 30, 1972, in New York City, John Lennon played his only full-length show after leaving The Beatles: the One to One benefit concert at Madison Square Garden, a rollicking, dazzling performance from him and Yoko Ono. Oscar®️-winning filmmaker Kevin Macdonald's riveting documentary takes that legendary musical event and uses it as the starting point to explore 18 defining months in the lives of John and Yoko. By 1971, the couple was newly arrived in the United States — living in a tiny apartment in Greenwich Village and watching a huge amount of American television. The film uses a riotous mélange of American TV to conjure the era through what the two would have been seeing on the screen: the Vietnam War, THE PRICE IS RIGHT, Nixon, Coca-Cola ads, Cronkite, THE WALTONS. As they experienced a year of love and transformation in the U.S., John and Yoko began to change their approach to protest — ultimately leading to the One to One concert, which was inspired by a Geraldo Rivera exposé they watched on TV. Filmed in a meticulously faithful reproduction of the NYC apartment the duo shared, ONE TO ONE: JOHN & YOKO offers a bold new take on a seminal time in the lives of two of history's most influential artists. DIR/PROD Kevin MacDonald; PROD Alice Webb, Peter Worsley. UK, 2024, color, 100 min. RATED R