Reviews: One to One: John & Yoko (2024) and Borrowed Time: Lennon's Last Decade (2025)
Living on borrowed time, without a thought for tomorrow.
Even though the Beatles broke up over fifty years ago, they're just as culturally significant as ever. It seems like every few months we get a new book, new documentary, or new movies (yes, I'm excited about Sam Mendes' Beatles Extended Cinematic Universe). Hell, we even got a new song a few months back. Beatles fans eat good.
You wouldn't think that there was much more or new to say, that perhaps people would start feeling Beatles fatigue like they do for superhero movies. But that's not true at all. You can even get two documentaries out at the same time about the same thing, as we do know with One to One: John & Yoko and Borrowed Time: Lennon's Last Decade, both about the post-Beatles life lived by Lennon, and Beatles fans like myself will run, not walk, to both. Comparing, contrasting, cross-referencing - that's the life of a Beatles fan.
Kevin Macdonald, the Oscar-winning cinematic biographer behind movies about Whitney and Marley, brings us One to One: John & Yoko. Covering 18 months in the couple's lives, the film is centered around the One to One concert they performed at Madison Square Garden to support the Willowbrook State School (the exposé of which is the most harrowing moment in the film) - John's only full concert post-Beatles. Using the concert as the film's centerpiece, we're presented with a scrapbook of concert footage, news clips, talk show appearances, and even Lennon's recorded phone calls (he was rightfully paranoid) that tell the story of how their social justice pursuits and their artistic endeavors became one and the same.
New footage largely consists of b-roll from a recreation of their shared Greenwich Village apartment. The two seemed quite content holed up together watching the tv at the foot of their bed, and their obsessive news-watching often became the sole inspiration for their music. "Attica State" is about the Attica State prison riots, "John Sinclair" is a plea to release the activist from his unfair prison sentence, for example. Macdonald's documentary shows us the news footage that the couple probably watched, lets us listen in on the phone calls John makes to write and perform the songs inspired by the television programs they watched, and then the music's impact on the country in performance.
The movie is still playing at select theaters, but had its biggest rollout on IMAX screens a few weeks ago before Sinners took them over. It's the perfect kind of thing for IMAX screens in between big and awesome movies like Sinners. Music, and it seems like rock music especially, works so well with that size and that sound. In the past few years, we've gotten Led Zeppelin, David Bowie, and even the Beatles' rooftop concert in IMAX release and it's been a real treat every time.
Take Lennon's most famous solo song, "Imagine," for example. This song has been run into the ground, with lyrics plastered across coffee mugs and pillows and bumper sticks and Gal Gadot's iPhone videos. When you're reminded about where that song comes from and what inspired it, and you see it performed on the biggest screen possible with perfect sound, it just might bring a tear to your eye. That's what happened to me.
Borrowed Time, from director Alan G. Parker (director of another Beatles documentary It Was Fifty Years Ago Today!), zooms out and covers what they call "Lennon's last decade." The two films complement each other largely because their structural approach is completely different. Parker opts for the talking head approach, which I find to be a useful and unfairly mistreated approach to documentary filmmaking. Sure, we all love and want to see boundary-pushing cinema, but I also appreciate hearing from direct sources. That's what we do for newspapers, for books, for researched anything - why do we shy away from it in film? Parker's film interviews musicians, tour managers, and the late Tony Bramwell, Apple Records CEO and close Beatles friend. Why wouldn't you want that?
John and Yoko's political activism is again at the forefront of the film, as it was at the front of their minds during this period. Putting their work in the cultural context of the time allows viewers to draw their own conclusions about their music and their legacies. I fear that the non-obsessive fans like you and I (I'm assuming you are if you're still reading this) think of John as a Beatle who got shot a few years later. Parker's film reminds us why the solo work is worthy of reexamination.
One thing I particularly appreciated about the film is the time it takes to cover everything. Other than the previously mentioned "Imagine," Lennon's output from the '70s is often dismissed as obvious or pedestrian. You can thank Bob Dylan for that. But Lennon's approach was what he called "rock journalism" and each story/song needs a full investigation and attention paid. The version of the film that I watched (which opens in UK cinemas on May 2nd) ran 134 minutes, while the Director's Cut (streaming on the same day for one month exclusively on the Icon Film Channel) runs three-and-a-half hours. It gives this story the time it deserves, especially since it covers so much more time than One to One.
If these two films aren't enough for you, there are even more out there (and all released in the past 24 months!) covering the same topics for your cross-referencing consideration. Erik Nelson's film Daytime Revolution zooms in to cover the week in 1972 that John and Yoko hosted The Mike Douglas Show, while Eve Brandstein's film The Lost Weekend covers the two-year relationship that John had with another woman - again putting under a microscope the amount of control and influence that Yoko really had on his life. These are things that Beatles fans can (and will) debate until the end of time, which is why we keep getting great documentaries.