Kevin Macdonald - 'One To One: John & Yoko' movie review (2025)

Making a good music documentary is hard. Making a good concert film is nearly impossible. It’s too delicate of a tightrope, too easy to fall into the cliches of being hero-worshipping or apathetic, over-explained or too tunnel-visioned, overdone or boring. With subjects like John Lennon and Yoko Ono, culture’s most obsessed-over couple, that hazard seemed even higher when so much has been said about the pair, and there is so much material to chew through. ButOne To Onenot only pulls it off but pulls off the impossible; Kevin Macdonald and Sam Rice-Edwards have made a music documentary and a concert film that is not only good but great.

John Lennon and Yoko Ono loved to watch TV. Between the years 1971 and 1973, the couple was obsessed with TV, and after the breakdown of The Beatles, the duo moved and traded in their Ascot mansion for a two-bed flat in Greenwich Village. In recorded interviews, they tenderly muse on that fact, discussing how the decision made them feel like people, like a normal newlywed couple, like they had the chance to actually build a life from the beginning in a lot of ways by slimming things down. It’s one of the many, many, many clips in the documentary that captures the fierce and enamouring love between the pair of world-famous lovers. All they needed was each other, the opportunity to make their art, and their television, which was placed at the end of their bed and was almost always on.

I mention it cause it’s essential to both the craft and the focus of One To One. So many of you might absolutely hate me for this comment, but when I left the cinema, I turned to my friend and said, “I loved how fast paced everything was, it was like watching TikToks.” In a world of shortening attention spans, Macdonald and Rice-Edwards cater to that in a lot of ways here. Scenes are skipped between like an impatient finger on a remote, moving sharply between clips of the couple, recorded interviews with the script on screen, advertisements, political goings-on and cultural goings-on, like footage of AJ Weberman riffling through Dylan’s bins.

It cannot be boring because it doesn’t allow you to be bored. Defeating one of the ultimate issues the genre often runs into, the team behind the documentary expertly use the couple’s obsession with consuming media to please an audience in a generation hungrier than ever for media – they keep it coming, never lingering on anything too long but at the same time, building something so intricate, so in-depth and so genuinely interesting in the process. While it might be expected that swift changing scenes would leave you feeling unsettled or unsatisfied, the effect is actually an ongoing excitement for what might be next, which lasts the entire run-time.

This TV effect is so central to the story at hand that the decision for it to inform everything is expertly cohesive in an unexpected way. At the core of the film is August 30th, 1972, Lennon and Ono’s One To One concert. Another issue the documentary skips over is the boring concert movie trope of lingering way too long on performances or failing to capture the energy of the show. Despite the movie being branded as being about that night, it’s not really at all. The odd performance moment is sprinkled amidst the channel hopping, along with truly beautiful and joyful clips of the mass crowd playing the free tambourines they were all given. But for most of the movie, this concert is behind the point.

Instead, the focus is largely on Lennon and Ono’s passionate politics. This was a period where the couple seemed hyper-focused on using their celebrity, and also their money, for good. Everything begins to come together here – with the sporadic clips, Macdonald and Rice-Edwards manage to build a thorough depiction of what America was like at the moment without over-explaining or slowing the pace. The moment’s climate is understood perfectly through this montage of moments, so all of the couple’s actions feel contextualised without them needing to go too deep into the obvious points about the duo that have been explored over and over.

There is, however, one point that gets a longer moment. Still, there is an ongoing and pervasively negative feeling towards Ono. She is still painted as the woman who split up The Beatles, Lennon’s groupie, the woman screaming on stage. So rarely is she afforded the respect she deserves as an artist in her own right. The clips of her at the first feminist convention speaking about this and the way the press upgraded her from a “bitch” to a “witch” when she married Lennon feels so interesting and so necessary, finally handing the mic to Ono herself and allowing it to be said in a way that should be heard.

However, Macdonald and Rice-Edwards protect themselves from this hurdle, too; this movie isn’t 100% wholly positive for the pair. Space is left for hypocrisy. There are moments when the audience questions their actions or motivations, largely in humorous moments where they clear the hurdle of over-explanation to let the footage do the talking simply.

One thing that is left as a wholly good thing is the One To One concert, allowing viewers to go all in on the joy of the day. The strings are tied up in a neat bow when the importance of their pair’s TV comes full circle as they organise this historic, free concert to raise money for Willowbrook State School simply because they saw it on the news one night and were moved. So when it comes back around to the concert, landing there in a more classic concert-film fashion in the finale, you’re so swept up in the times, so caught up in the couple’s mission, so hooked in by these ever-changing, interest-renewing clips – the arrival of the day of the show mimics exactly how it must have felt for those there.

If a moment does feel rose-tinted, it is this, and that feels about right. If you were in the crowd seeing John Lennon at a free concert, you would be overjoyed. You would dance and sing and bang your tambourine and be swept up in the experience. As the movie allows you to do that as the ending to a fun and interesting 100-and-something-minutes, the realisation hit: One To One pulls it off – it’s a rare, perfect music documentary about two figures that feels especially perilous to explore.

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