I’ve seen documentaries reveal fascinating dimensions of John Lennon — films like “The U.S. vs.
John Lennon” (2006), which chronicled his political activism and the Nixon administration’s attempts to deport him, or “The Lost Weekend: A Love Story” (2022), a portrait of Lennon’s relationship with May Pang. But “One to One: John & Yoko,” despite its rather nondescript title, may be the most accomplished and arresting of these tightly angled Lennon profiles. “The Lost Weekend” showed us a side of Lennon that had been somewhat under the radar (including his propensity for violence, which has never been widely talked about outside of Albert Goldman’s scandalous deep-dive biography “The Lives of John Lennon”).
“One to One” deals with the period just before the Lost Weekend, starting in August 1971, when John and Yoko moved from their country estate outside London to New York City, where they spent 18 months living in a small apartment in the West Village. (It was after that that they moved into the Dakota.) Lennon was out and about, digging the city, appearing on American talk shows like “Mike Douglas,” grooving on the relative non-chaos of his life after the Beatles.
And much of this has a familiar aura. But “One to One” was made by the accomplished and at times audacious Scottish director Kevin Macdonald, whose films range from “Touching the Void” to “The Last King of Scotland” to “Whitney,” and he lures us into John Lennon’.
