Two lovers: "One to One: John & Yoko"

Having tackled (Bob) Marley and Whitney (Houston), the industrious Kevin Macdonald here leaps aboard the ever-rolling Beatles bandwagon with a film that picks up more or less where 2021's Get Back left off. One to One, for which Macdonald extends a co-director credit to editor Sam Rice-Edwards, hones in on one (ex-)Beatle at a very specific moment in Beatles history: that spell either side of the 1972 charity concert of the title, which came about after John (Lennon) and Yoko (Ono) left London for New York, settling into a new life and routine that would span the next decade until the singer's murder in 1980. This transatlantic move is framed, in the film's opening movement, as an escape from an England where John had become so closely tied in the popular imagination to his now-defunct band, and where Yoko had been calumnied in the press as that terrible foreign woman who broke the Beatles up. Yet the relocation was hardly a new beginning in receptive climes, more a case of out of the frying pan and into the fire - a state of affairs Macdonald and Rice-Edwards illustrate via a rapid-fire assembly of clips from the TV their subjects watched as they inched their feet beneath the table of the New World. On one set of channels: The Waltons, The Sonny & Cher Show and The Price is Right, programming engineered to affirm that everything was awesome in the land of the free. On other, newsier platforms, however: Attica, Richard Nixon, George Wallace, the ongoing conflict in Vietnam and the protests that provoked, Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Richard Nixon back again, and the attempted assassination of George Wallace. If John and Yoko were looking for peace and quiet in the wake of the Beatles' fallout, then early 1970s America was just about the last place the pair might have found it.

Two Americas, then, two directors, and for much of its running time, One to One often feels like two films in one. One half is a conventional concert movie, boasting the obvious hook of remastered, Dolby-boosted footage you'll likely never have seen before of an event you may never have heard about. This half plays the hits, as indeed Lennon himself did on the night - "Come Together", "Instant Karma", "Mother" and (yes, I'm sorry) "Imagine" - with a little help from Yoko and Stevie Wonder among others. Yet this footage has been intercut with a rather more probing documentary, one that asks what exactly was on John and Yoko's mind(s) in the early 1970s, and eventually comes up with the answer "a fair bit". (Everything, it transpires, from the future of mankind to the flies Yoko was attempting to source for one of her installations; here, alas, Macdonald and Rice-Edwards reduce the latter's more conceptual art to a recurring comic bit.) What One to One is trying to do is yoke together two different types of performance - that of a mere pop star reconnecting with his rocky roots (a route his old mate and writing partner Paul assiduously followed in his first few years outside the Beatles), and that of the public figures who turned up, night after night, to benefits, rallies and the taping of primetime talkshows, and had more to say at this moment than ob-la-di-ob-la-da. The film lays out John and Yoko's victories in the field of activism - springing the poet John Sinclair from a jail cell, raising over a million dollars with the titular concert for a self-evidently worthy and necessary cause - but also some sense of how their openness to ideas and suggestions forever risked tipping over into celebrity guilelessness. (For one thing, Lennon appears to take the National Association for Irish Freedom far more seriously than we can, given the acronym.)

For John, at least, it all connected up; as he's heard to insist in one of the phonecalls he and Yoko taped for posterity (with odd, underexplored echoes of Nixon in the White House), "I'm still an artist, but a revolutionary artist". The "but" there is as the tape Macdonald and Rice-Edwards use to splice their two films together: haphazardly applied, but it holds for the most part, so long as no-one examines it too closely. Much as this John found himself at a crossroads, so does the film cast around. There's plenty of period colour, lots of Mad Seventies Shit, including a hostage negotiation where the ransom payment was taken up by a man clad in swim shorts; we often appear to be zapping not just between different channels but adjacent realities. It's some feat of cutting, and one that absolutely immerses us in the tumult of this era, but you may find yourself - as I did - wanting a little less editing and a little more direction in its place: the construction of some central thrust or argument, far greater provision of context and commentary. Instead, One to One turns a vast lump of hitherto hidden archive material over to us - power to the people! - and waits to see what we can make or infer from it all; in documentary terms, this is very much the equivalent of those 50th anniversary boxsets that package up every extant version of any given song on the album, indifferent to any notion that true artistry might be a matter of selection, of paring down to the singular and essential. Much of this pick-and-mix footage is lively and interesting, and some of it is truly fascinating and revealing, but the whole is recognisably Get Back-coded: another one chiefly for the completists among us.

One to One: John & Yoko is now playing in selected cinemas.