By Stephanie Hernandez
The new documentary One to One: John & Yoko offers an illuminating look into John Lennon’s post-Beatles activism with his partner Yoko Ono. It captures an early 1970s climate that was charged with political unrest and media saturation.
Rather than perpetuate the simplified myth of Lennon as a lone revolutionary figure, the film spotlights Ono’s equally influential role in their shared artistic and social endeavours.
The film also highlights how Lennon and Ono aimed to galvanise a generation that had grown apathetic and disillusioned after the perceived failure of the 1960s “flower power” to deliver genuine social change.
The film adopts a pop-art, “channel surfing” aesthetic that situates the viewer in a recreated version of Lennon and Ono’s Greenwich Village apartment. This form plays on Lennon’s own television addiction. The story unfolds amid rapid cuts between Richard Nixon reelection speeches, anti-war demonstrations and playful consumer ads for laundry soap or ground beef – as if the viewer is surfing television channels.
These scenes coalesce into a surreal tapestry of commercialism and counterculture. The interplay echoes the way Lennon and Ono saw pop culture and radical activism as inescapably intertwined discourses. It underscores how even seemingly mundane aspects of consumer life impinged on their activism and vice versa.
Lennon’s politics had emerged during his time as a Beatle, as evidenced in the song Revolution (1968). But it was Ono’s avant-garde sensibility that nudged him into more radical territory – both musically and socially.
I’ve researched Ono’s comedic artistry in her performance art. So I found the way One to One portrays Ono seamlessly blending her artistic principles with raw emotional outcries onstage especially compelling.
Her presence surfaces most powerfully in her onstage performance of Don’t Worry Kyoko (Mummy’s Only Looking for Her Hand in the Snow). There, her raw, piercing screams function as a form of cathartic protest rather than mere provocation. Despite widespread media ridicule (such as the infamous Chuck Berry footage that resurfaces on the internet every now and then), One to One clarifies that Ono’s screams constitute a highly personal mode of expression and resistance.
Later in the film, Lennon’s own raw performance of his song Mother (1970) reveals how much Ono’s techniques informed his own. The documentary explores the emotional origins behind Ono’s shrieks, situating them within the context of primal scream therapy. This provides an interesting background to Lennon’s own wailing on Mother, a song about the lingering feeling of abandonment he had experienced since childhood.
The film highlights a mutual borrowing. Lennon was not only the rock artist providing Ono exposure on the world’s stage but also a beneficiary of her experimental practices. Throughout the film, the couple are shown workshopping protest songs, connecting with countercultural figureheads such as poet Allen Ginsberg and activist Jerry Rubin, and aiding in counter-cultural protest of the American prison system.
This sense of reciprocity between the couple is at the core of One to One.
Complementary forces
The One to One Benefit Concerts in August of 1972 at Madison Square Garden are at the epicentre of this film. Far from a publicity stunt, the shows sought tangible outcomes. They ultimately raised over US$1.5 million (£1,149,000) for Willowbrook State School, a facility for children with disabilities. Coincidentally, Lennon and Ono learned about the school through watching TV.
The film includes an emotional scene of the children from Willowbrook playing in a park while Lennon performs Imagine. It shows how the song was never intended to canonise Lennon as a saint, but was rather to encourage social change.
Although their plans to bail out people in prison on a Free The People tour fell through, Lennon and Ono’s capacity for integrating live music with direct engagement resonates in the concert footage.
The film devotes considerable screen time to the concerts and crowd reactions. This portrays the physical energy of Lennon’s brand of rock ‘n’ roll and Ono’s more avant-garde flair as complementary forces. What emerges is a dynamic synergy, both onstage and off, that positions them as co-leaders of their own brand of pop activism.
Towards the end of the film is footage of Ono delivering a speech about the ridicule she has faced in society and performing the song Age 39 (Looking Over from My Hotel Window) at the First International Feminist Conference at Harvard University in 1973.
This segment includes home video footage of Ono walking among the witch sites of Salem, Massachusetts, symbolising her shifting role in society. She explains that she was “upgraded” from a “bitch” to a “witch”. One to One’s portrayal of Ono as a collaborator of Lennon’s rather than a reduction of her to a romantic partner points to how the narrative tide is changing, and Ono is finally getting her due recognition.
One to One captures a moment when their combined artistry, activism, and mutual exchange of vocal techniques converged – creating an indelible record of how two personalities shaped protest music, pop culture and each other.
