Review of "One to One: John & Yoko"

As They Really Were

Nov 16, 2025

My wife and I just finished watching One to One: John and Yoko, the 2024 documentary, 141 minutes, comprised of never-seen-before and newly restored footage, of John and Yoko and others, singing and talking, now on HBO. It takes place mostly in New York City, in the early 1970s. For all kinds of reasons, I thought it was one of most powerful, effective documentaries I’ve ever seen.

Here are some of the reasons, in no particular order:

“Ballad of John and Yoko” and “Oh Yoko” have for decades been among my most favorite songs. (Neither is in the movie, but I tell you this to let you know that I expected a lot from this movie, which I got.)
Yoko has a beautiful singing voice. I don’t know why, but just about everything I’ve heard her sing up until One to One has Yoko wailing, often off-key. But that obviously was a deliberate performance. In fact, she was a fine, sensitive singer.
Speaking of performances, I always thought John and Yoko’s interlacing campaigns for peace, justice, women’s rights, and just plain decency were some combination of real commitment and performative art. I thought the real commitment was most of it, but after seeing One to One, I think it was all of it. John Lennon may have wanted to have hit records in the 1970s, but they were all on behalf of deeply worthy causes.
And Lennon’s singing sounded better than ever. His performance at the One to One Concert put on to help kids at Willowbrook and kids with other disabilities was dynamite magic, at least as good as what he sounded like with The Beatles, with songs ranging from “Mother” to “Give Peace a Chance” and of course “Imagine” with lyrics that were more profound and important than anything The Beatles sang (as brilliant as so many of their songs are).
The documentary makes John and Yoko’s love for New York palpable. It pulsates through the screen.

But that brings me to the end of the movie, which rolls with the joy that Lennon felt when he beat the deportation charges that Nixon brought against him (Nixon, the worst American President until he was usurped by the current holder of that office). But we who lived past the end of 1980 know that this celebration of a happy ending was tragically premature. The bullets that One to One showed crippling George Wallace in his Presidential campaign in 1972 would go on in 1980 to take the life of John Lennon. They were the same bullets, in as much as they shouldn’t have gotten into the guns that got in the hands of the sicko psychos who pulled the triggers. But this was America. It still is.

But that’s another true story. For tonight, my advice is see this documentary, and learn who John Lennon and Yoko Ono really were.

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