There’s an incendiary passion to Kevin Macdonald and Sam Rice-Edwards’ captivating documentary portrait of John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s creative New York life in the early 1970s. Set over the same time period when Gil Scott-Heron released ‘The Revolution Will Not Be Televised’, the co-directors strike a similar ironic and poetic tone, using a montage of TV commercials, archive footage and audio recordings. It’s also reminiscent of Radu Jude’s recently released Eight Postcards From Utopia.

The title refers to benefit concerts which John and Yoko held after learning of gross negligence at the Willowbrook school for children with special needs; 16mm footage of a concert is interspersed with often hilarious phone calls of the pair attempting to get their creative pursuits (including Yoko’s dogged pursuit of flies for an exhibition) and activism off the ground. Macdonald and Rice-Edwards humorously and cleverly juxtapose the righteous political messaging of Richard Nixon’s consumerist America with the counterculture and civil rights movement. The assault of advertisements and nicely edited together clips viscerally catapult the viewer into a turbulent moment in time. 

Trailblazing Black journalist John Johnson’s empathic reporting for ABC News is present as is Shirley Chisholm’s reaction to the shooting of segregationist George Wallace. Images of the Vietnam War are spliced between protests against Nixon, and writer AJ Weberman going through Bob Dylan’s bins. John and Yoko’s domestic life in Greenwich Village is presented through photographs and home movies of their cosy apartment complete with bed placed in front of the TV, and intimate sessions of them jamming together. While it skips over certain details including Lennon’s affair (already extensively covered in The Lost Weekend: A Love Story), it’s refreshing to see the duo’s endeavours and collaborations share top billing in this celebratory, highly entertaining and informative documentary.

One To One: John & Yoko is in cinemas from Wednesday 9 April.